Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century 9781442630253

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: History as a Life Form
1. Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science
2. An Epicurean Democracy in Language: The volte face in Johann David Michaelis’s Early Career
3. Reill’s Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie
Part Two: Vitalism in Political and Cultural Translation
4. “That Infinite Variety of Human Forms”: Modern Identity and Portraiture in Enlightenment England
5. Was Marat a Vitalist?
6. The Vital Organism in the Thought of Humboldt and Mill
Part Three: Esotericism and the Enlightenment
7. Constructs of Life Forms in Lavater’s Physiognomy
8. The Preaching Philosopher: Andreas Weber (1718–81) between Wolffian Philosophy and Heterodox Theology
9. Between Myth and Archive, Alchemy and Science in Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Cabinet of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo
10. The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

LIFE FORMS IN THE THINKING OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES General Editor: Barbara Fuchs

LIFE FORMS IN THE THINKING OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Edited by Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

© The Regents of the University of California 2016 www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-3024-6 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Life forms in the thinking of the long eighteenth century / edited by Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs. (UCLA Clark Memorial Library series ; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3024-6 (cloth) 1. Vitalism. 2. Science – History – 18th century. 3. Enlightenment. I. Baker, Keith Michael, author, editor II. Gibbs, Jenna M., 1961–, editor III. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series ; 24 Q175.32.V65L53 2016

509.409′033

C2016-900266-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

For Peter

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Contents

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction

3

KEITH MICHAEL BAKER AND JENNA M. GIBBS

Part One: History as a Life Form 1 Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science

19

M A RT I N G I E R L

2 An Epicurean Democracy in Language: The volte face in Johann David Michaelis’s Early Career 45 AV I L I F S C H I T Z

3 Reill’s Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie 70 JOHN ZAMMITO

Part Two: Vitalism in Political and Cultural Translation 4 “That Infinite Variety of Human Forms”: Modern Identity and Portraiture in Enlightenment England 95 FRÉDÉRIC OGÉE

viii

Contents

5 Was Marat a Vitalist?

110

KEITH MICHAEL BAKER

6 The Vital Organism in the Thought of Humboldt and Mill

125

K R I S PA N G B U R N

Part Three: Esotericism and the Enlightenment 7 Constructs of Life Forms in Lavater’s Physiognomy

153

ANNETTE GRACZYK

8 The Preaching Philosopher: Andreas Weber (1718–81) between Wolffian Philosophy and Heterodox Theology 179 R E N K O G E F FA RT H

9 Between Myth and Archive, Alchemy and Science in EighteenthCentury Naples: The Cabinet of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo 208 C L O R I N D A D O N AT O

10 The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël H E L E N A R O S E N B L AT T

Contributors 247 Index

251

233

Illustrations

1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

Johann Christoph Gatterer, conversion of Chaldean helakim into minutes, Abriss der Chronologie (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1777), 9 23 Johann Christoph Gatterer, western hemisphere: comparison of river valleys and political boundaries, “Atlas 1” (s.l., 1789). Collection SUB Göttingen 25 Johann Christoph Gatterer, Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa (Göttingen, 1766), table 4 26 Carl von Linné, “Caroli Linnaei Classes S. Literae,” in Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales: Secundum numerum, figuram, situm, proportionem omnium fructificationis partium (Leiden: Wishoff, 1737), annex 29 Charles François Toustain and René-Prosper Tassin, Nouveau traité de diplomatique, où l’on examine les fondemens de cet art par deux religieux Bénédictins de la Congrégation de S. Maur, vol. 2 (Paris: Desprez & Cavelier, 1755), 340, table 23, enlarged section 30 Johann Christoph Gatterer, air pressure, temperature, humidity, Göttingen, December 1779 and January 1780, “De anno meteorologico fundamentali commentatio lecta d. 18. Nov. 1780,” in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores: Commentationes classis physicae 3 (1781), diagram after 120 32 Johann Christoph Gatterer, climatic quarters (“Witterungsquartiere”), “Atlas 2, Kleine Special-Chärtchen: Zur Verwendung im Kolleg zur Universalhistorie” (s.l., s.a.). Collection SUB Göttingen 33

x

1.8

1.9

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 7.1

7.2

Illustrations

Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Durationem populorum, regnorum, civitatum sistens, Tab. 1,” in Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa (Göttingen, 1766), tables 1 and 2 35 Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Synchronized Overview of All of History,” in Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1771), 3 (followed by English translation) 37 William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas (1743) 98 William Hogarth, Southwark Fair (1733) 100 William Hogarth, Before and After (1736) 102 William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, Plate 1: The Marriage Settlement (1743–5) 104 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), vol. 6, chap. 40 106 Johann Caspar Lavater, profile line of the foreheads of “very intelligent and thoughtful minds” in relation to lower parts, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 4, 44 158 Johann Caspar Lavater, from the frog to a woman’s face, Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 5 (in folding charts at back) 170

Acknowledgments

The genesis of this volume was a two-day conference held in April 2012 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. We are grateful to Professor Barbara Fuchs, director of the Center/Clark, for her support of the conference. We would also like to thank all of the Clark and Center staff, but most especially Candis Snoddy, assistant director, for her tireless and thorough organizational efforts; Programs and Fundraising Director Kathy Sanchez for her production and communication expertise; and Web Programmer and Technology Assistant Alistair Thorne, who ensured that the image-driven presentations ran flawlessly. We would also like to thank Barbara Fuchs for her sustained support of this project as it developed into a more expansive volume, with additional contributors, and for her willingness to propose it as part of the University of Toronto Press UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Thanks also to all of the authors for their stimulating essays and cooperation during the editorial process. We would like to offer special thanks to Richard Ratzlaff, editor at University of Toronto Press, for his excellent advice and seemingly endless patience in shepherding this project to completion and to all of the University of Toronto Press staff. Last but not least, our warmest thanks to Peter Reill, whose work inspired and provided the initial celebratory occasion that gave birth to this volume.

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LIFE FORMS IN THE THINKING OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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Introduction KEITH MICHAEL BAKER AND JENNA M. GIBBS

Scholars have been moving away for some time from the long-held, conventional view of the Enlightenment as uniformly rationalistic, secular, and mechanistic. In recent decades, they have rediscovered that broad space within eighteenth-century thinking in which Cartesian dichotomies between mind and matter, abstract reason and mechanical determination, mathematical demonstration and the uncertain world of living beings yielded to more complex explorations of sense and sensibility; purpose and function; continuity, teleology and emergence; spirit and imagination; and the multiplicity of life forms. Peter Hanns Reill’s research has been at the forefront of these developments. His Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, published in 2005, was a manifesto for a more comprehensive and variegated description of the eighteenth-century understanding of nature. It also offered a deeply researched analysis of broad strands of vitalist and historicist thinking, theories of organic interconnectivity and development, and esoteric ideas woven into the richly varied conceptual fabric of the Enlightenment. The essays in this volume seek to advance this exploration, working across national and regional boundaries to engage not only French and English but also Italian, Swiss, and German writers. Interest in vitalism has by now travelled far beyond the world of eighteenth-century historiography. Its importance has been recognized in many areas of thought from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including science, medicine, evangelical piety, political economy, nature, art, romanticist literature, and history.1 There is even a nascent interest in how early modern vitalist theories have shaped contemporary homeopathic medicinal systems, which are founded on the premise that the physical body is animated by a vital life force or forces.2 The essays in

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this volume return to the eighteenth century, however, pivoting explicitly around how vitalism permeated many and unexpected aspects of its thinking – about history and language, physiology and politics, theology and mysticism. Together they offer a canvas, albeit pointillistic, that turns out to be very different from simplistic views of Enlightenment reason and its legacies. Part One, “History as a Life Form,” explores historicism, philology, and the relationship between Enlightenment vitalism and the Naturphilosophie that succeeded it. “The common opinion that the eighteenth century was an ‘unhistorical’ century, is not and cannot be historically justified,” Ernst Cassirer asserted long ago.3 Since Cassirer’s then radical proposition, most historians have revised the once traditional view of the Enlightenment as ahistorical. Reill’s The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism was instrumental not only in rebutting the view of the “unhistorical” eighteenth century but also in demonstrating the importance of the German Aufklärung as more than the poor cousin of enlightenments to the west.4 German philosophy of history, however, still gets short shrift in English-language scholarship. True, works by prominent German thinkers like Kant, Lessing, and Herder take their place alongside important historical works by the likes of Montesquieu, Condorcet, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume. But lesser-known representatives of the Aufklärung whose intellectual presuppositions may be just as important for our understanding of eighteenth-century historicism have received far less attention. Among them is Johann Christoph Gatterer, a professor of history at the University of Göttingen from 1759 to 1799. Martin Gierl’s essay, “Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science,” demonstrates the need to reconstruct eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking on its own terms – sometimes contradictory to the modern eye – rather than trying to force it into a secular, mechanistic straitjacket. As Gierl elucidates, Gatterer believed human history to be divinely ordained yet also sought to observe it scientifically using methods (inspired by Linnaeus’s approach to natural history) to create maps, tables, and diagrams that classified it in terms of chronological epochs, geographical realms, and meteorological zones. He also attempted to apply vitalist natural science to history: he saw scientific construction of history not as rendering a static, mechanical world, but rather as a dynamic, teleological process brought to life through climate and culture. Convinced, with Montesquieu, that the characteristics of a people and state were shaped by climate, Gatterer tried to discover the laws of weather as a way of providing

Introduction

5

an empirical understanding of changes in states and systems of power over time. At the same time, he charted the cultural history of civilizations by plotting the evolution of language in a complex set of charts using letters, icons, symbols, and writing as recorded indices of geographically and diachronically diverse cultures and political systems. Gatterer was far from alone in stressing the important intersections among history, language, and the evolution of human civilization. Debates about language, cognition, and civilization were central to the German Aufklärung, as elsewhere.5 Johann David Michaelis, an orientalist professor at the University of Göttingen, was a prominent contributor to these discussions.6 Avi Lifschitz’s essay, “An Epicurean Democracy in Language: The volte face in Johann David Michaelis’s Early Career,” focuses on a shift in Michaelis’s view of Hebrew in the mid-1750s that forced a comprehensive change in his theory of the evolution of language and human civilization. This transformation in Michaelis’s view of Hebrew was part of a larger eighteenth-century debate about the nature of linguistic evolution that originated at the University of Halle, where Michaelis studied under his Pietist theologian father. The discussion hinged around a long-cherished Protestant thesis positing the antiquity and unchanging nature of the Hebrew language and its vowel sounds. Michaelis ultimately repudiated this view of Hebrew as the original, divinely inspired tongue. Inspired by the Epicurean definition of language as purely a medium for communication and a response to needs, he came instead to embrace the idea that Hebrew had undergone constant changes in orthography, form, and register. The implications of Michaelis’s change of heart were not merely confessional. His understanding of the Hebrew language as historically evolving and contextually contingent engaged him in a larger Enlightenment dispute over the reciprocal influence of language, thought, and political and legal systems. Espousing a conception that Lifschitz dubs “epicurean democracy,” Michaelis concluded that if language naturally evolves through common usage, it is, “in a word, a democracy, where the will of the majority determines usage.”7 This meant a departure from the kind of scientific codification represented by both Linnaeus’s use of Latin nomenclature for flora and fauna and the related taxonomies that Gatterer and others applied to the creation of a universal history. Michaelis believed that because these kinds of classifications were artificially superimposed by scholars, they lacked the consensual, “democratic” nature of historically evolved language. For Michaelis as for Gatterer, however, his naturalistic account of the evolution of civilization and language was

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Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs

not at odds with his religious convictions. His emphases on historical evolution and contingency also drove the translation of the Old Testament that he contributed to what Jonathan Sheehan has termed “the Enlightenment Bible.”8 Part One concludes with John Zammito’s essay, “Reill’s Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie.” It is offered as a strong rejoinder to Peter Reill’s argument, in Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, that there is a fundamental difference between Enlightenment vitalism and nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie. Reill acknowledged that “Romantic Naturphilosophie could not have been constructed without concepts generated by Enlightenment vitalists” but maintained that its “intellectual, moral, and scientific agenda” was very different. Enlightenment vitalism, he insisted, should “not be treated as an episode in the prehistory of Romantic Naturphilosophie.”9 Zammito argues, in opposition, for a clear continuity between eighteenth-century vitalism and nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie, not necessarily in terms of intention but in terms of effect. The details of the debate – which pertain specifically to the relationship of Herder and Kant in the movement from Enlightenment vitalism to Naturphilosophie – are complex, but the essence of the disagreement is over the relationship between spirit and matter in the two movements. Reill sees Enlightenment vitalism as refusing the dichotomy between mechanistic materialism and animism, and with it the priority of spirit to matter, and seeking instead a principle of goal and purpose within nature and history. Zammito counters that the emphasis of Naturphilosophie on the role of spirit as the force driving matter from within is a logical extension of the Enlightenment vitalist teleology. His response to Reill will not end debate over the relationship between these two intellectual currents – on the contrary, it may succeed best at provoking further discussion. Part Two, “Vitalism in Political and Cultural Translation,” investigates uses of vitalist conceptions of goal-directed living forces in art, literature, physiology, and politics. It begins with Frédéric Ogée’s “‘That Infinite Variety of Human Forms’: Modern Identity and Portraiture in Enlightenment England,” which examines how William Hogarth’s portraiture and Lawrence Sterne’s biographical novels drew on vitalist conceptions of nature. Ogée demonstrates how a new understanding of the life sciences reshaped English conceptions of self and identity, which in turn set a new template for artistic and literary representations of life forms. His point of departure is Michel Baridon’s analysis of how Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty, developed his aesthetic theories in response to vitalist

Introduction

7

conceptions of the movements of nerves and muscles and the circulation of blood. This vitalist aesthetic intersected with an emergent sense of the individual self. The market economy and parliamentary monarchy, Ogée writes, undermined older ideas of predetermined and immutable social hierarchies. They thus gave birth to a new sense of the individual as capable of progress, understood as dynamic evolution over time produced by lived experience. In Ogée’s analysis, vitalist notions of motion and this new sense of self combined to profoundly affect Hogarth’s and Sterne’s representations of life forms. By adopting a sequential form of representation in his portraiture (as in A Harlot’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode, or Before and After), Hogarth imbued it with the modern sense of individual character emerging as the result of experience. He also incorporated vitalist scientific ideas of dynamic, goal-directed forces into his representations of the new individuated self by lending his portraits a thrilling sense of energy in motion, in part by situating private individuals in ludic spaces of thriving sociability. Sterne, who not coincidentally convinced Hogarth to illustrate his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), similarly embedded the modern sense of self and vitalist conceptions of nature in his biographical novels, each featuring the life progress of an individual. Sterne, as Ogée shows, overtly linked the individual self to Enlightenment vitalist theories of the functioning of the mind in relation to the body. The question of the relationship between mind and body lies at the heart of Keith Michael Baker’s essay, “Was Marat a Vitalist?” Baker focuses on two early works of the future French revolutionary: An Essay on the Human Soul (1772) and A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773), both written in English. At the time of their publication, young Jean-Paul Marat had left his native Switzerland and was practising as a doctor in the cut-throat medical market of Hogarth’s London. Already a fervent enemy of the mechanical materialism he associated with the French philosophes, and eager to achieve philosophical glory, he set out to save the soul through physiological investigation. He was influenced in this endeavour by the vitalist surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, an inveterate critic of Albrecht von Haller’s more mechanistic explanations of physiological irritability and sensibility in animals. Le Cat imagined that invisible fluids, infused with the divine spirit and flowing through the universe into the human body, were the agent of sensations and sensibility. Baker shows Marat caught between Haller’s mechanism and Le Cat’s animism. Marat accepted Le Cat’s belief in vitalist forces but stripped

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Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs

them of any spiritual dimension. At the same time, he insisted on retaining a physical location for the soul within the body and posited that sensations are transmitted to the soul by the nervous fluid, upon which the soul then acts to produce voluntary motion. Insisting on the reciprocal relationship between the soul and body, Marat was nonetheless driven towards conclusions that effaced the soul and emphasized the role of physiological organization in the formation of the individual personality. In Baker’s analysis, the case of Marat suggests that only a thin line separated vitalism and materialism: vitalism could be materialized into theories of physiological organization, as it was by Denis Diderot (who read Marat with interest) and later by Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis. Baker also hints that Marat’s insistence on goal-directed vital energies, coupled with his belief in a sovereign centre located in the brain, offers clues to understanding his later radical politics of popular sovereignty. Kris Pangburn also examines the links between vitalist philosophy and political thinking – albeit in a very different register – in his account of “The Vital Organism in the Thought of Humboldt and Mill.” Pangburn is especially concerned with Enlightenment conceptions of personal liberty, which he explores by examining the impact of the life sciences on the political philosophies of Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. He posits that although writing almost seventy years apart, these thinkers patterned their individual political philosophies on conceptions of the self that rested on the analogy of a living organism imbued with its own active agency and powers of movement, a counter to Descartes’s mechanistic view of the self. In The Limits of State Action (written in 1791 but published only in 1851), Humboldt articulated a vision of political philosophy, built on a vitalist philosophy of nature, that Mill directly credited as the intellectual edifice of his defence of individual freedom in On Liberty (1859). Drawing on vitalist natural philosophy and medical treatises, Humboldt stressed Sinnlichkeit, a term (defying direct English translation but akin to “sensuousness”) that served to describe vital forces of animal drives, instinctual urges, sense perceptions, and sensibility. In a departure from mechanistic mind-body dualism, he thus saw the self as active and driven by emotional energies. The crucial importance of Sinnlichkeit for Humboldt’s expositions of the relationship among the self, personal liberty, and the state was that minimal state interference and maximal freedom were needed in order for this active, goal-directed self to become fully realized and hence able to contribute to social progress. Pangburn plausibly postulates that Mill embraced Humboldt’s vitalist rejections of mechanist determinism and explicitly borrowed his notion

Introduction

9

of an autonomous self animated by vital energies that guided its development. On these grounds, Pangburn argues, Mill also spurned state or societal efforts to fashion the self towards externally determined, “rational” ends, thus sharing Humboldt’s conviction that selves should have maximum freedom to evolve towards their developmental goals in a minimalist state. Part Three, “Esotericism and the Enlightenment,” explores the significance of alchemical, hermetical, and occult thought for Enlightenment thinkers and challenges the conventional bifurcation between esotericism and magic, on the one hand, and “rational” scientific experimentation, observation, and theory on the other. In recent years, scholars have begun to recognize that esoteric, hermetical, and alchemical thinking was frequently integral, rather than marginal, to the intellectual enterprises of natural scientists, theologians, and philosophers long before the nineteenth century’s spiritual pursuit of the occult. It is worth remembering that Johann Georg Forster, the German ethnologist and naturalist who travelled with James Cook to the Pacific and was an avid supporter of the French Revolution, believed in the transformation of base metals into gold. Similarly, Isaac Newton before him had used alchemical procedures to try to create gold from air, called “Luftgold” by the Enlightenment theologian and advocate of hermeticism Johann Salomo Semler.10 Several recent scholarly enterprises reflect this comparatively new emphasis on acknowledging esoteric sciences as an intelligible set of intellectual tools. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton have called for historians to give astrology and alchemy their due as “a coherent body of practices strongly supported by institutions.”11 In the Dutch context, Wouter J. Hanegraaff has been instrumental in establishing the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, devoted to researching esotericism as a field of study. At Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies has conducted a five-year program on Enlightenment and Esotericism, directed by Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, which has produced many monographs and a culminating multi-authored volume.12 At Stanford University, Dan Edelstein has offered a collective volume on The Super-Enlightenment – Daring to Know Too Much (2010). Taken together, these projects (and others of kindred spirit) constitute a plea to move beyond the notion of a radical disjunction among Enlightenment science and alchemy, hermeticism, and esotericism. Our volume concludes with four responses to this call.

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In “Constructs of Life Forms in Lavater’s Physiognomy,” Annette Graczyk directs us towards Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian who was also very invested in aesthetic representations of life forms, as evidenced in his physiognomic portraits and also his close friendships with artists such as the painter and Zwinglian cleric Johann Heinrich Füssli and the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet. Lavater, Graczyk explains, sought to revise and rehabilitate physiognomy in his four-folio work, Physiognomische Fragmente, published between 1775 and 1778. The practice of physiognomy – inferring character from physical human form and facial characteristics – had been closely associated with prophesy, astrology, and magic. One aspect of physiognomy, for example, was the practice of chiromancy – i.e., using the lifelines on the palms of the hands to make predictions about an individual’s life chances and trajectory. Because of these linkages, physiognomy had fallen into disrepute during the early Enlightenment, as shown by Louis de Jaucourt’s characterization of it in his Encyclopédie as a bogus pseudo-science. Graczyk argues that one motivation for Lavater to reconstitute physiognomy was that old forms of physiognomic thought and the practice’s associations with magic still held sway among literati in the latter half of the eighteenth century. To counter what he saw as a dangerous carryover of unchristian ideas, Lavater assumed the task of formulating a rational, scientific foundation for physiognomy that retained some of the older esoteric doctrines but rejected those he deemed either chicanery or “black art” as being incompatible with his Christian convictions.13 As a consequence, Lavater rejected so-called planetary lines or lifelines as indicative of a person’s fate or the influence of celestial bodies. But he attached great importance to the forehead, “the temple of the intellect,” and also to the hands as organic life forms expressive of personality, intellect, and – akin to Hogarth – internal vital forces. In contrast to Hogarth’s stress on the individual self’s evolution-in-motion, however, Lavater’s conviction that human character was identifiable through fixed markers was in tension with a conceit of Enlightenment epitomized by optimism and progress. Renko Geffarth, in turn, focuses on Andreas Weber, a little-known professor of philosophy at Halle who also incorporated esoteric thinking into his theological prescriptions. Geffarth’s essay, “The Preaching Philosopher: Andreas Weber (1718–81) between Wolffian Philosophy and Heterodox Theology,” examines how Weber displayed “a pluralized intellectual identity.” Weber was a protégé of Christian Wolff, whose rationalistic views had provoked a fiery controversy in the 1720s that

Introduction

11

resulted in his ouster from his professorship at the University of Halle (although he was later reinstated). At the same time, he was a fully committed Freemason who belonged to a lodge that perpetuated some of the seventeenth-century occult emphases on sacred architecture (like the Temple of Solomon), mnemonic arts, and a debt to Rosicrucian secret knowledge. Crucially, there were demonstrable links at Halle between the lodge and theological Wolffianism. Weber dedicated to the master of that lodge one of his main philosophical treatises, The Conformity of Nature and Grace (1748–50), a tract offering instruction in a reasoned Christianity that would deter readers from religious enthusiasm. Weber, as Geffarth detects, also wrote Masonic publications, such as speeches to be delivered during lodge meetings. Geffarth points here to Freemasonry’s esoteric elements – and Weber’s embrace of them – to counter what he regards as a common misperception of Freemasonry as merely a site of secularized sociability similar to coffeehouses and salons. His claim that Weber and other Enlightenment thinkers could “harbour differing and apparently irreconcilable intellectual ‘identities’ depending on the audience he was addressing” serves to strengthen the argument that esoteric thought should be integrated into, rather than expurgated from, our understanding of the Enlightenment. Freemasonry is also central to Clorinda Donato’s story of Enlightenment sociability in “Between Myth and Archive, Alchemy and Science in Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Cabinet of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo.” Donato views enlightenment Naples through the complex figure who founded the first Masonic lodge in that city and used it to build an extensive network of exchange from a cross-section of nobility, artisans, academics, philosophers, and scientists. Di Sangro’s Neapolitan palazzo – which he fitted out with a scientific laboratory, a library, and a printing press of his own invention – became a hub of scientific and alchemical enquiry. Donato presents the tenets of Neapolitan Freemasonry as fundamental to Di Sangro’s alchemical and esoteric lines of scientific enquiry: the preservation of life and the understanding of the relationship between life and death. These themes underpinned Di Sangro’s project to create “anatomical machines,” which would simulate cadavers, to expose the blood and lymphatic pathways that could preserve the functioning of inner life forces. Scientists used Di Sangro’s purpose-built laboratory to attempt to simulate and recreate bodily fluids in these wax models using alchemical methods.

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Donato’s study, like Geffarth’s, invites us to imagine a polysemous Enlightenment in which “the Enlightenment project” can no longer be easily emblematized by secularized reason. Like Geffarth, Donato describes Freemasonry as far more invested in the occult than interpretations of it as a secularized sphere of sociability would have it. Indeed, Donato demonstrates that the occult aspects of Freemasonry were just as important to Enlightenment thinking as the movement’s purported proto-democratic dimensions, which are often touted as evidence of Freemasonry as a rational, secular venture. Moreover, and akin to Geffarth’s vision of Halle, Donato paints a portrait of Naples as a thriving hub of a multifaceted Enlightenment in which “the alchemical and the scientific … coalesced into new forms of scientific and fraternal sociability.”14 Her work argues not only for a more expansive view of Freemasonry but also for one that sees alchemical and hermetic traditions, far from being outliers, as deeply imbricated in Enlightenment scientific discourses. Helena Rosenblatt also begins “The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël” by passionately disputing the scholarly tendency to dismiss esoteric thought and practice as irrelevant to our understanding of a rational, “mainstream” Enlightenment. In the case of Madame de Staël, Rosenblatt suggests that scholars are “missing the point” when they dismiss her emotionalism and mysticism as “mere aberrations, or embarrassing contradictions, in her otherwise rational thought or as evidence of feminine frailty.”15 So, too, are scholars who insist that de Staël shifted from an “originally enlightened, rationalist position to a romantic or mystic one later on,”16 a shift supposedly demarcated by her 1804 trip to Germany and the romanticist influence of Friedrich von Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Instead, Rosenblatt proposes, what critics have perceived as a contradiction in de Staël’s oeuvre was actually a self-conscious attempt to reconcile oppositions in pursuit of truth and progress in an Enlightenment that was an age both of reason and sentiment. She shows that de Staël, drawing on constructs of gender that postulated that women were more susceptible to impressions and emotion than men, saw herself as embodying both masculine rationality and mystical, sentimental, feminine forces. Critics have focused on de Staël’s On Germany, and most especially on its chapters on mysticism and religious enthusiasm, as constituting her purported breach from the Enlightenment. But Rosenblatt counters these interpretations, explaining how de Staël praises and defends both the Enlightenment spirit of enquiry and religious enthusiasm – or, as de Staël interchangeably

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phrases it, the “sentiment of infinity” or “mysticity” – as together, and in creative tension, offering an avenue to a higher truth. Rosenblatt’s exposition underlines further the need to revise the questions, assumptions, and classifications that we apply to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking. For, as she argues, the question of whether de Staël belongs to the Enlightenment or to romanticism, or of whether she underwent a transformation from one to another, rests on a mistaken assumption that the Enlightenment can be reduced to the conventional Age of Reason at the expense of sensibility and also esotericism. True, de Staël did explicitly distinguish mysticity from alchemy, illuminism, and occult practices. Nonetheless, allowing for her mediation of emotion and reason offers us a much richer and more robust understanding not only of de Staël herself but also of the Enlightenment more generally. Our hope is that the essays in this volume demonstrate the difficulty of segregating the kinds of issues and questions posed by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians, philologists, political theorists, philosophers, artists, literary writers, scientists, and theologians into tidy – or not so tidy – categories. They show eighteenth-century thinkers engaging with an interrelated set of issues – the nature and variety of life forms, definitions of the self and of personal liberty, the mechanisms of evolutionary change and progress, the relationship between religion and reason, and the mediation between older occult knowledge and newer claims to scientific truth – albeit postulating tremendously different solutions. They offer the challenge of understanding a more variegated Enlightenment than is often acknowledged.

NOTES Earlier versions of some of these essays were presented at a two-day conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA in honour of Peter Hanns Reill’s scholarship on the Enlightenment. Several scholars not involved in the conference have also contributed to this volume, which thus brings together the current research of senior and more junior career scholars interested in confronting and reappraising conventional interpretations of the place of historicist, vitalist, and esotericist thinking in the Enlightenment. 1 To scratch but the surface of recent scholarship: Sebastien Normandin and Charles T. Wolfe, eds., Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment

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2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12

Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs Life Science 1800–2010 (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2013); Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Chang (Kevin) Ku-ming, “Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter: Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early Modern Chymistry,” Isis 102, no. 2 (June 2011): 322–9; Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (London: Ashgate, 2003); Brian Garret, “Vitalism and Teleology in the Natural Philosophy of Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712),” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 1 (March 2003): 63–81; Brett Malcolm Grainger, “Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather,” Church History 81, no. 4 (December 2012): 852–72; Catharine Packham, “The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (July 2002): 465–81; Denise Gigante, “Blake’s Living Form,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63, no. 4 (March 2009): 461–85. See, e.g., Matthew Wood, Vitalism: The History of Herbalism, Homeopathy, and Flower Essences (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2000). Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 197. Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1–2. Jonathan Knudsen, “The Historicist Enlightenment,” in What’s Left of the Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 39–49; citing 41. Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11. Johann David Michaelis, quoted in Avi Lifschitz, “An Epicurean Democracy in Language: The volte face in Johann David Michaelis’s Early Career,” this volume. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 199. “Religion, Theology, and the Hermetic Imagination in the Late German Enlightenment: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler,” in Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein, ed. Robert Westman and David Biale (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, eds., Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 3, 5. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Renko Geffarth, and Markus Meumann,

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15 16

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eds., Aufklärung und Esoterik: Wege in die Moderne, Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung, Schriftenreihe des Interdisziplinären Zentrums für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung Martin-LutherUniversität Halle-Wittenberg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013). Johann Caspar Lavater, quoted in Annette Graczyk, “Constructs of Life Forms in Lavater’s Physiognomy,” this volume. Clorinda Donato, “Between Myth and Archive, Alchemy and Science in Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Cabinet of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo,” this volume. Helena Rosenblatt, “The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël,” this volume. Ibid.

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PART ONE HISTORY AS A LIFE FORM

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chapter one

Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science M A RT I N G I E R L

In the early nineteenth century, Johann Christoph Gatterer was called a “man of his epoch”1 because, for forty years, from 1759 to 1799, he championed and, in crucial ways, pioneered the study of history in his capacity as professor of history at Göttingen, one of the leading universities of the German Enlightenment. At Göttingen, he became one of the most prominent German historians of the 1760s and 1770s and founded the Institut der historischen Wissenschaften (Institute of Historical Sciences), which was the first specialist institute to conjoin research with ongoing expert discussions. He also published systematic compendia on historical sub-disciplines: numismatics, chronology, and heraldry. Moreover, his compendia on geography, genealogy, and diplomatics – the study of documents – were still used as standards well into the nineteenth century. For Gatterer, universal history was especially important, not least because it was the framework for Enlightenment historiography in general. He published no fewer than ten universal-history compendia and radically revised each successive edition. To this end, he began each anew; instead of merely beginning the most recent edition where the last had left off, he rewrote the history in each from beginning to end. His concern was to make history a scientific discipline. The Institute of Historical Sciences that Gatterer founded in Göttingen had some four hundred members, including Lichtenberg, Schlözer, Meiners, Schröckh, Meusel, Johannes von Müller, and numerous other German historians, librarians, and archivists. When it was officially dedicated in 1766, Christian Gottlieb Heyne, who made considerable contributions to the development of ancient studies in Germany, stressed in his inaugural address that history was no longer the history of rulers. History, he

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proclaimed, had become complete by including culture, state constitutions, and institutions – areas of study that Gatterer’s new institute embraced. Today, Anthony Grafton agrees with Heyne’s assessment and asserts that if one were to pinpoint the beginnings of modern historiography, it would be Gatterer’s institute.2 I agree with both Heyne and Grafton. For, in Gatterer’s institute, the new cultural anthropology gave rise to critical discussions of innovative ways to render history and tackle problems pertaining to historical methodology. At the institute, Gatterer also presented his thoughts on how to investigate history with greater exactitude: that is, approaching history not only as an aggregate of facts but also as a coherent social system, encapsulated in, for example, his notion of “world statistics.” The institute had two historical journals, the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek and the Historische Journal, which both embraced Gatterer’s modern disciplinary concerns with historical method and universal history. What distinguished Gatterer was his effort to render history complete and systematically organize it in its entirety. Presenting a series of chronological, geographical, and genealogical facts had long been at the centre of the historical discipline. This technique coexisted with the new philosophically based historiography of, for example, Voltaire, Raynal, and Hume, which had made inroads in France and Scotland and was concerned with tracking the development of civilization. By the end of the eighteenth century, both approaches had become worldhistory narratives based on arguments and sources. In the 1760s and 1770s, during the brief moment between the two paradigms, the history of civilization and natural history, historical and physical anthropology, philosophy and political science, physics, chemistry, and geology battled over the definition of culture and civilization, thus spawning “vitalism,” as Peter Hanns Reill describes it.3 Gatterer was a key contributor to vitalist historiography as he integrated the methods of natural science into historiography. His attempts to make history more scientific mirrors the possibilities, necessities, and limits of the transformations that these two scholarly paradigms were undergoing, and as such his work is more than worthy of our attention. Peter Reill’s work was crucial to the rediscovery of Gatterer in the 1970s, and his work on Gatterer is still fundamental to our understanding of his project.4 According to Reill, “Gatterer’s basic idea was to found history as an autonomous discipline, which could compete with the exact sciences.”5 I have explored Reill’s notion in my book on Gatterer, which has three main theses, each of which I discuss more briefly in this essay.6

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First, in the early modern period, historiography was primarily a matter of construction and not narration; its basic structure consisted of compilations of “remarkable” facts. Historical facts were organized in a chronological, geographical, and genealogical fashion, assembled in a kind of historical architecture rather than a narrative. In other words, historical events were not so much written as culled, ordered, and consolidated, lending structure to one’s world orientation. Second, Gatterer introduced scientific methods to the historical field. To this end, he sought to preserve certain points of intersection between civil and natural history and thus history as a whole, but above all to define and arrange the remarkable facts more specifically. Historiography, Gatterer believed, should generate history that was not only verifiable but also allowed one, at a glance, to survey the course of events together with their underlying forces. Thus, history should be a map of precise facts that corresponded to interrelated geological, meteorological, geographical, political, and cultural systems. Third, Gatterer divided history into epochs, which resulted in his making distinctions along historical-immanent lines that traced the historically generated, developmental steps of the systems involved. This application of historical-immanent bases – rather than theological, philosophical, or formal classifications – was, for Gatterer, the springboard into practising history as an autonomous discipline. The foci of this essay are Gatterer’s attempts to conjoin science with history and nature with culture by implementing scientific measures to amplify the traditional forms of constructing historical facts. Gatterer sought to put history on an equal footing with the rapidly advancing natural sciences by articulating a coherent historical methodology in relation to the world. I have summarized Gatterer’s marriage of scientific approaches to the study of history in five points.

The Framework: Time and Space The most famous maxim of early modern historiography was Historia magistra vitae. But for Enlightenment historians like Gatterer, who were invested in scientifically exploring and investigating history, another maxim became far more important: chronology and geography as the two eyes of historiography.7 Gatterer, along with Giambattista Vico, Christian Wolff, and many others, employed this metaphor, which rose to prominence with Ortelius and likely originated with Ptolemy.8 The first eye was time, which constituted the essential basis of writing history.

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Indeed, it was the historian’s task to synchronize the various chronologies of disparate cultural and political spheres in such a way as to construct a general history. Gatterer saw the computational composition of various calendars as an absolutely foundational project because it conjoined historiography and astronomy and thus made historians into arithmeticians and astronomers into historians. Church patriarchs – such as Eusebius and Hieronymus (as well as the astronomers Kepler, Scaliger, and Newton at a later date) – were famed as chronologists.9 Chronology was thus not only a practical matter of computations but also an absolute must from a historico-philosophical standpoint, especially because it was necessary for historians to explain how the chronologies of various cultures accorded with the biblical account of Creation. For Gatterer and other Enlightenment historians, it was also necessary that eighteenth-century historians be capable not only of determining the time of day locally but also of computing differing calendars. In his guide to chronology, Gatterer first explained the evolution of basic timekeeping cycles – the sun and moon cycles, the indiction cycle, genealogy – then the conversion tables for all of these cycles. He also analysed the carry-over of these cycles to what he termed “cardinal eras”: that is, he placed the respective date ranges in relationship to, for example, the creation of the world and the birth of Christ. On these bases, he then divided the calendar into epochs. This formal division drew on the calendars themselves: Roman, Greek, Jewish, Arabic, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Chaldean, Syrian, Persian, Indian, and Chinese. He concluded the volume with tables charting the new and full moons according to the old and new calendars, Scaliger’s Julian years, and the Berlin clock.10 Gatterer first taught his students to situate the time according to varied locales. A reviewer of Gatterer’s compendium praised the fact that the author had developed so many new methods of time calculation, such as his conversion of Chaldean helakim into minutes (Figure 1.1). Geography was the second eye of history. To put the remarkable facts of history in order, it was necessary to accurately contextualize and situate them in time and space. Thus, Gatterer, like other early modern thinkers, deemed geography – and, specifically, universal geography – to be an auxiliary discipline to history.11 Gatterer taught universal geography and published two extensive compendia in which he first described the natural and political boundaries of countries. In these compendia, he also offered overviews of the natural resources, economy, political constitution, and religious and cultural idiosyncrasies of various states.12 To complement these analyses, he drew historical maps that traced the

Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science

Figure 1.1 Johann Christoph Gatterer, conversion of Chaldean helakim into minutes, Abriss der Chronologie (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1777), 9.

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development of states and nations. In particular, he borrowed the largevolume east-west hemispheres of the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, but imbued them with varying colours in order to show a variety of historical developments.13 The result was one of the first-ever sequential historical atlases (from which only a single stunning page has survived). Gatterer’s efforts also included creating maps that traced geological conditions in parallel with developments in statehood and civilization.14 Gatterer modelled his historical atlas, in part, on a medieval atlas that had attempted to depict in 24 maps the changes in politics and civilizations that took place from the Huns through the Reformation.15 Following the geologist Philippe Buache, Gatterer reproduced the river basins of the eastern hemisphere of the Old World and the western hemisphere of the New World and matched them to various state territories. He created his maps just as Enlightenment discourses about the relationship of the New and Old Worlds began coalescing into the nascent disciplines of philosophy, geography, and history. Gatterer and other Enlightenment historians surveyed world history from both a natural and a cultural perspective: they juxtaposed western and eastern global hemispheres and contrasted the New and Old Worlds both geographically and historically (Figure 1.2). For Gatterer, once a given history’s temporal and geographical framework was determined, the historian’s third task was to fill the chronological and geographical grid with historically remarkable facts. Like some two hundred other early modern historians, Gatterer employed historical Tafelwerke, or tableaux.16 The use of tables to document historical events had a venerable tradition dating back to clay tablets in Babylonia and the libraries of ancient Greece; but by the sixteenth century, such tables had grown into complex tableaux. Girolamo Bardi’s massive, 1,500page chronologically organized compendium from 1581 – in which he included a world chronology, a list of rulers, biblical events, illustrious men, important national dates, and information pertaining to Italian provinces – was, all told, composed of 61 columns.17 Similarly, Christoph Helwig divided his Theatricum Historicum (1609) into centuries, which he cut up into fifty, ten, and finally five-year slices, with the increments of time dramatically diminishing as he approached his own time period.18 In 1707, a century after Helwig’s work, the geographer, globe maker, and encyclopedist Vincenzo Coronelli published an encyclopedia, Bibliotheca Universalis. Coronelli included a section titled “Cronologia Universale,” which presented tables and sub-tables that closely corresponded

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Figure 1.2 Johann Christoph Gatterer, western hemisphere: comparison of river valleys and political boundaries, “Atlas 1” (s.l., 1789). Collection SUB Göttingen.

to Gatterer’s notion of presenting world history as a set of general and particular maps. After the usual genealogies of popes and rulers, Coronelli offered special tables that diversified these main tables.19 Like his forerunner Helwig, he constructed a universal history by conjoining globally and specifically situated genealogies of rulers within a broad schema of chronologically synchronized universal time. The genealogies

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Figure 1.3 Johann Christoph Gatterer, Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa (Göttingen, 1766), table 4.

of ruling-power potentates added a grand historical narrative to the tables’ chronological and geographical dimensions. Coronelli used their periods of rule to objectively record the interior construction of what he deemed to be the universal-historical edifice. Like Helwig and Coronelli, Gatterer aimed to tell a universal history through visual tables, as is evident from Figure 1.3, a page from Gatterer’s history tableaux. In keeping with eighteenth-century conventions, he used different columns to map critical events in the history of states and churches, historia literaria, and scholarly history. He divided the historical tableaux into columns delineated by centuries, thus giving history an order in which its main events were defined, mapped, and correlated. Church history, political history, and cultural history – which Gatterer used as the three pivotal branches of early modern history – were thus placed in relation

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to one another. The century columns were narrower or broader depending on the number of events that they contained. The tableaux defined not only objects but also specific forms of universal history. Gatterer also added a peculiar feature: he arranged the history of rulers into two columns: one that mapped the beginning, and the other that traced the end, of states. He thus integrated a historical dynamism into his tableaux, a point to which I will return. It is no accident that Gatterer’s tables resembled an open cabinet as they constructed early modern universal history as the sum of its constituent histories. That is to say, the history of countries and empires were in turn composed of “specialized histories” of their regions, cities, and so forth.20 The impact of Gatterer’s “open cabinet” design cannot be overestimated: in the eyes of his contemporaries, history was a cabinet filled with all historically relevant events, arranged according to their appropriate position in time and space. But this way of producing, conveying, and authorizing knowledge – by arranging all of the elements of an object in their ascribed place in a cabinet – was not limited to historical writing. Other disciplines such as anatomy, botany, jurisprudence, and theology followed this model. Through their definition and the assertions that could be made about them, these objects became knowledge by being classified and juxtaposed in their respective places in the topica universalis. The systematic and non-alphabetically ordered encyclopedias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thus presented a general cabinet that reproduced knowledge in its general, particular, and special spheres, each of them analogously ordered. Knowledge took on the form of a structurally planned tree. The tree, however, was not living because the world created by assigning all of these objects to their proper place was geometrical and mechanical. Enlightenment thinkers vitalized scientific cabinets on a broader basis only in the second half of the eighteenth century.21 Before this, the history cabinet shared a fundamental disadvantage with other cabinets of knowledge: its order froze history. To make it both more dynamic and scientific, therefore, Gatterer had to conjoin the cabinet with both cultural and natural history. To do this, he had to transform the historical dates that had been localized in the cabinet into a dynamic process.

Tableaux of Cultural History: The Evolution of Writing Today, Gatterer’s approach of researching culture scientifically is both disconcerting and quaint, but for his contemporaries, it was illuminating and ingenious. One of the building blocks of Gatterer’s universal history

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was researching writing systems. Here he sought to combine botany and diplomacy by classifying the development of writing in a botanical fashion. He attempted to record and classify, according to genera and species, the various forms and historical peculiarities of the graphical characters of the entire world’s writing systems in order to demonstrate the evolution of writing. Gatterer sought to construct a comparative model by which to determine the age and origin of each and every text. But by classifying writing, he also hoped to create an instrument with which he could describe the cultural development of the peoples of the earth. The various writing concepts and their respective stages of development – catalogued as ideographs, syllables, or letters – would make civilization measurable.22 Gatterer’s basic underlying rationale was that culture, like nature, fulfilled God’s plan; different cultures conveyed meanings whose provenance stemmed from one and the same creator. Although culture and nature both embodied meaning, they were two differing forms of text: the book of nature and the book of culture. If a historian could only decode the alphabets in which culture and nature were written, he could read the past. Gatterer’s idea was not, per se, new: Francis Bacon had proclaimed the imperative of discovering the alphabet of nature so as to practise scholarship and acquire erudition in a scientific manner. Carl von Linné also believed that he had discovered a lexicon for botany, and he constructed 24 botanical letters on the basis of plantal sexual organs – that is, on the basis of stamens and fruit bunches (Figure 1.4).23 The botanical principle of using natural – i.e., empirically pre-existing – differences in form so as to construct classifications of human linguistic and societal development was adopted by leading representatives of diplomatics, including students of the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon. In his De re dipomatica libri sex (1681), he developed tests for ascertaining the age and authenticity of documents and thus provided their history with a scientific foundation. Two of his students, Charles François Toustain and René Prosper Tassin, wanted to realize Mabillon’s goals once and for all. They aimed to reconstruct the evolution of Latin script on the basis of the development of letters and botany, which they accordingly categorized in typefaces and sub-forms to create a classification matrix for documents. They published large-format tableaux, filled with up to five thousand letters, which they chose from a pool of no less than four hundred thousand examples of letters.24 They created an overview of the evolution of Latin script and reproduced the letters according to the development of their forms, classified by chronology and according to nation; they then organized these form-specific series into groups. If one

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Figure 1.4 Carl von Linné, “Caroli Linnaei Classes S. Literae,” in Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales: Secundum numerum, figuram, situm, proportionem omnium fructificationis partium (Leiden: Wishoff, 1737), annex.

looks at this excerpt from the tableaux of Toustain and Tassin – the table juxtaposes Italian, French, German, British, and Spanish Latin script – one can see Roman numerals and Arabic numbers interpolated. The Roman numerals stand for the centuries, while the Arabic numbers designate the respective series in development of a certain letter (Figure 1.5).

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Figure 1.5 Charles François Toustain and René Prosper Tassin, Nouveau traité de diplomatique, où l’on examine les fondemens de cet art par deux religieux Bénédictins de la Congrégation de S. Maur, vol. 2 (Paris: Desprez & Cavelier, 1755), 340, table 23, enlarged section.

Gatterer was enthusiastic about the work of Toustain and Tassin, which he built on by developing genera and species from their templates, with the goal of making available to scholars of diplomatics classification tools for indexing handwriting and for dating and tracing documents. He named the system as a whole Linnaeismus graphicus. Linné’s botanical method was incontestably useful for classifying the world of plants, and Gatterer asserted that it was even more important when transferred to the realm of writing. Whereas botanists used it merely to determine the number, characteristics, and system of plants, in the discipline of diplomatics one could also use it to register the history of the writing; in short, one could trace the evolution of the letters.25 It was, indeed, difficult for botanists of the eighteenth century to understand the development of plants beyond merely classifying and registering the actual inventory; by contrast, diplomatics scholars were historically primed and used the development of letter forms as a medium of classification. Hence, Gatterer developed Messtafeln, or measuring panels, that denoted which features of letters and script were customary in which centuries. Scholars of diplomatics could apply these measurements of letters and script to test particular cases in order to determine the year of origin of the analysed source. To be sure, Gatterer tested his Messtafeln on the Tabula peutingeriana, a famous Roman street map published in 1753 and dated as being from late antiquity.26 He analysed the forms of

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its letters, classified the related font in his generic system, and correctly dated the map to the thirteenth century.

Tables, Maps, and Diagrams of Natural History: Climate and Civilization In the various scientific disciplines of the eighteenth century, it was popular to categorize not only alphabets and documents but also climate. However, the primary focus at the time was no longer on the remarkable, monstrous, and wondrous of previous centuries but rather the distinctive: eighteenth-century thinkers wanted to have and know everything; whether plants or geology or civilization, they wanted to be able to read, locate, differentiate, and classify them. In this effort, climate was the classic key to explaining the spectrum and development of civilization.27 Indeed, there was a broad consensus that climate was the fundamental determinant of a peoples’ peculiarities of character, society, and political constitution. Although ancient geology and its description of the land had divided the earth into climatic zones along degrees of latitude, in the eighteenth century that schema was no longer sufficient. In keeping with the zeitgeist, Gatterer demanded a more nuanced world at both the local and the global level. Given the significance for Enlightenment thinkers of climate as an index for the development of civilization, it was little wonder that Gatterer viewed meteorology as an important sphere of historical knowledge. Starting in November 1779, he conscientiously recorded the temperature and the atmospheric humidity and pressure in Göttingen over the space of a year.28 After doing so, he asserted, “Nobody hitherto has written a more complete meteorological history over the course of a year than I.”29 He prided himself on the comprehensive nature of his measurements, particularly the frequency with which he recorded his data. He used the barometer and thermometer that Göttingen’s first professor of philosophy, Hollman, had owned, and a hygrometer from the Augsburg instrument-maker Georg Friedrich Brander.30 Gatterer had sporadically collected weather data as early as 1770, but on 8 November 1778 began to do so systematically: not just two or three times a day, per the common contemporary practice, but every hour, sometimes every quarter-hour. When there was a special weather event, he also took measurements at night. In his report, Gatterer dramatized his weather reportage, conveying the impression that he was on a dangerous mission or arduous expedition as opposed to just taking measurements in sedate

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Figure 1.6 Johann Christoph Gatterer, air pressure, temperature, humidity, Göttingen, December 1779 and January 1780, “De anno meteorologico fundamentali commentatio lecta d. 18. Nov. 1780,” in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores: Commentationes classis physicae 3 (1781), diagram after 120.

Göttingen.31 And, somewhat immodestly, he laid before the Göttingen Royal Society of Sciences a diagram of these meteorological measurements in large folio (Figure 1.6). Gatterer dreamed of decoding weather’s regularities to construct a weather calendar that could be a companion to the astronomical calendar; he could then combine the complementary measurements of time, the seasons, and the climate to create a calendar of civilization’s natural

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premises. He offered a foretaste of this objective in tables that catalogued the essential climate data of a country or its important cities, which he appended to his geographical descriptions of the land.32 Gatterer undertook his highly optimistic goal of a weather calendar by first dividing the world into climatic zones using maps. For example, one map showed the mountain ranges of the world, another illustrated the world’s oceans and their prevailing winds, and yet another displayed the resulting four “climatic quarters.” In addition, he apportioned oceans to the large land masses and annotated them with the prevailing winds. Using these methods, he then – availing himself of Philippe Buache’s river basins and mountain chains – subdivided the four climatic quarters into further areas that appertained to water circuits (Figure 1.7). Gatterer developed twenty forms in which weather data and other parameters were to be recorded, particularly solar radiation and the phases of the moon.33 Gatterer believed that these empirical weather, solar, and lunar measurements would make it simple to recognize recurring patterns and thereby establish certain laws regarding the weather. While quixotic, supplementing his geographical compendium with accurate climate data was so innovative that he nonetheless succeeded in bringing geography closer to being an empirical science.34

Figure 1.7 Johann Christoph Gatterer, climatic quarters (“Witterungsquartiere”), “Atlas 2, Kleine Special-Chärtchen: Zur Verwendung im Kolleg zur Universalhistorie” (s.l., s.a.). Collection SUB Göttingen.

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Tables, Maps, and Diagrams of Cultural History: History as the History of Ruling Power Gatterer, however, aspired to create more than just a static compilation of data. Hence, his history needed a structuring spine, a centralizing line of development that would make it dynamic. He decided that the spine was to be the history of states and rulers, which was the old chronologicalgeographical-genealogical tradition of universal history.35 But how Gatterer constructed it was new. He identified and displayed the founding and dissolution dates of all of the better known states as bars on a chart, arranged from left to right along lines of a kind of “empire principle” – that is to say, the sequence of world empires. Then he specified the power relations among the individual states and gave them corresponding colours. The leading empires were red, competing states were green, independent states were yellow, and marginal states were black. The visual result was two diagrams that replicated the historical timeline and thus presented the course of history at a glance. The theoretical background was the idea that countries of a certain epoch formed specific power systems and systems of rule based on two criteria: first, whether one or several main powers were involved and, second, the nature of the relationships among these powers and the remaining countries. Power systems and systems of rule characterized Gatterer’s world history. He divided them into “systems of subservience” and, for the modern era, “systems of alliances”36 (Figure 1.8). The first bar diagram portrays the Old World.37 It shows, from left to right, the chronology of ancient empires beginning with Babylon and followed by Persia, Greece, and Rome. In this fashion, the countries of the respective ruling systems surround them, linking dominion, chronology, and geography. A historical diagonal extending from the upper left to the lower right represents a specific historical development – namely, the imagined power shift from east to west. In the second bar diagram, the historical line is split into two diagonals. The first, frayed one is formed by the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mongolian empires; the second, compact one shows the development of the European states. Whereas the first diagram represents a selective history (and, in the case of the Mongolian empires, enters world history as a black curve), the European bars of the second one form a unit that is variously criss-crossed with red ruling powers. By using two diagrams to turn a historical construction into a historical image, Gatterer solved two fundamental problems of historiography.

Johann Christoph Gatterer and History as Science

Figure 1.8 Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Durationem populorum, regnorum, civitatum sistens, Tab. 1,” in Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa (Göttingen, 1766), tables 1 and 2.

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First, he broke up the continuous timeline that bound the biblical tradition to secular history. He separated the history of the ancient world from that of the modern, and the transition to modernity from the newly constituted Middle Ages formed the bridge between the Old and New Worlds. He could show the history of the New World to be historically open and developmentally oriented, while keeping the Old World within the framework of the classic power-transferral model that proceeded from the story of Creation. Second, Gatterer’s historical line dynamized history, which (for him) became a system of linked ruling-power systems that would foster further historical developments. Ruling-power data constituted states, and these states had recognizable relationships with one another. In sum, history could be measured. For Gatterer, there was no fundamental difference between the weather curves and the timeline of ruling power: both were composed of a chain of specific events. Both weather history and the growth and decline of power among the respective ruling systems could be gauged. This measuring and recording of the “remarkable” events of history in terms of time and space, and the determinations of the changes wrought by the events in the overall picture, formed Gatterer’s methodological model of the historical paradigm of the period, which he deemed to be “pragmatic” historiography.38 Two publications by Joseph Priestley, the theologian, historian, philosopher, and chemist who discovered oxygen, were contemporaneous with Gatterer’s diagrams of 1766: Chart of Biography (1765) and New Chart of History (1769). The first of these consisted of 1,200 little lines, each representing the dates of a scholar or statesman, lines that thus depicted culture in its entirety as a biographical cloud. The second publication corresponded to Gatterer’s ruling-power map.39 Gatterer used a kind of double time system, which still depicted the existence of a state along the y-axis (just as the historical Tafelwerke had traditionally listed their historical data in tabular form, going from top to bottom, while documenting the development of the entire system on the x-axis). Priestley, by contrast, showed his historical bars of the countries proceeding from left to right, thus using the x-axis to depict the passage of time. Gatterer’s and Priestley’s diagrams signalled a small revolution: after centuries of simply collecting and collating things, they introduced the measurement and portrayal of processes. Gatterer and Priestley would prove prescient as in the nineteenth century, diagrams that measured the march of time would become among the favourite instruments of the natural sciences and even emblematic of the social sciences.40

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Creation of a Self-Referential History The tableaux that Gatterer repeatedly published starting in 1771 provide an instructive summary of his historical conception. In particular, one he titled “Synchronistische Uebersicht der ganzen Historie” (“Synchronized Overview of All of History”) offers an outline of his historical construction (Figure 1.9). Because Gatterer believed that the earth had been in existence for 5,754 years, he employed in this tableau a calendar era counting from the biblical creation of the world: anno mundi (“in the year of the world,” or the year after Creation), abbreviated to A.M.

Figure 1.9 Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Synchronized Overview of All of History,” in Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1771), 3 (followed by English translation).

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Martin Gierl I. Creation years of the world (A.M.) 1. The Fall of Man (A.M.) 1. Arts *900–1000. The Flood 1656.

No nations, no kingdoms.

Eight ruling nations or Systems of subservience.

Age of historical auxiliary tools [Notwerkzeuge]: Tempus adelon et mythikon.

II. Origin of the nations (A.M.) 1809.

II.

Assyrians 1874. Persians 3425. Macedonians 3648. Romans 3838–3939. Parthians 3808–45 and since A.C. 226 Persians.

Age of the biblical and classical historiographers: Tempus mythikon et historikon.

Idiolization 18** Circulation of the sciences 18** The Nativity 3983.

III. Migration period Saec. V.

III.

Germans and Slavs Saec. V. Arabs 622. Mongols and Tartars 1209/1399.

Age of the chroniclers and writers of documents.

Pope A.C. 606 and Mohammed 622. Crusades 1096–1291. Art of printing 1440–30 and conquest of Constantinople 1453. Therefore restoration of the sciences.

IV. Discovery of America 1492. Systems of alliances and Systems of subservience.

I.

Reformation 1517 and Council of Trent 1545–1563. Balance of Europe Saec. XVI. and Peace of Westphalia 1648. New philosophy Saec. XVII. XVIII.

IV. Age of the collectors, critics, aesthetics, pragmatic historians.

The tableau is composed of epochs, which Gatterer named after the fundamental revolutionary events that he believed were the point of departure for every new era: Creation, Origin of the nations, Migration period, and Discovery of America. Here ancient history is rooted in the story of Creation and the early formation of empires and nations, followed by the transitional Middle Ages and culminating in the discovery of the New World, which is portrayed in diagrams delineated by the ruling powers.

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The individual epochs emerge as a series of political, cultural, and religious upheavals, which are, in turn, based on events that had general and particular historical significance. History as a whole begins with the Fall of Man in the mythical epoch. Through the development of techniques of civilization, the Fall then paves the way for the further course of history. With the onset of the Flood, humankind enters into “real” history – namely, that of peoples and states.41 In Gatterer’s view, this development of civilization began with the Babylonian confusion of tongues in the year 1809 (A.M.), which spawned the formation of nations and thus a system of subservience. Sciences emerged, but also “idol worship,” which was at the root of various religions. The birth of Christ concluded the epoch of the founding of nations and old empires because Christianity weakened Rome. The epoch comprising the migration of peoples followed. After the rise of the Papacy and the clash of Christendom and Islam in the Crusades, history moved forward with the growing power of the Ottoman Empire and the invention of moveable type, dramatic changes that by period’s end climaxed in a crescendo of new political and cultural constellations. After the discovery of the New World, the epoch of subservience and alliances dawned (i.e., political history). The Reformation, reformed Catholicism, the European balance of power, and the “New Philosophy” (which was sworn to truth in all fields) then ushered in the religious, political, and scientific revolutions of the modern era.42 But rather than merely compiling static clusters of events, Gatterer interpreted world history as a dynamic chain of general and particular revolutions. He was convinced that this understanding of history, which brought under the same rubric religious and political history as well as the history of knowledge, was the history of the Enlightenment. In this way, he had taken history from the cabinet of facts and transformed it into system-history. In the left column of the tableau above is the development of political systems: at first there are no nations; then states develop, along with their systems of servility. These states, in turn, develop into the chain of the old empires. They subsequently differentiate into Ottoman, Mongolian, and European ruling-power structures before the early-modern stage of systems of servility and alliances finally emerges. Of particular interest is the right column, in which Gatterer places developmental historiography alongside ruling-power history (to the left) and the series of epochs (in the middle). As Gatterer would have it, an era of biblical and classical historians followed an initial dark and

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mythical period. Thereafter, there was the epoch of chroniclers, which was eclipsed by the time of collectors, aestheticians, critics, and pragmatic historians, followed by Gatterer’s present, a time in which historians investigated the reasons for the course of a given history. Gatterer’s “Synchronized Overview of All of History” thus divided history into epochs on the basis of essential events, which built upon each other yet were distinguished from one another politically, culturally, and in terms of the historical perception of the respective eras; taken together, the epochs thus formed a political, cultural, and historiographical unit. Gatterer’s definition of history and its epochs along historical-immanent lines instead of along formal, theological, or philosophical ones meant nothing less than defining history as an autonomous object of enquiry, which consequently resulted in introducing historical writing as an autonomous discipline.43 Nineteenth-century historicism did what it could to discredit the historiographical achievements of the eighteenth century. Gatterer was still remembered in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century, but mostly negatively. His world-history schema was considered outdated, and he himself was mocked as an oddball with his Linnaeismus graphicus. The simple fact is that Gatterer’s attempt to construe history as a science offered only very limited access to the complexity and breadth of historical events. But – and it is a big but – his approach laid the foundation for what is still today the architecture of European history: antiquity, Middle Ages, and the modern era. He did so not by transporting any philosophical or moral valuations into the field of history, but rather by dynamizing the old historical cabinet with scientific instrumentation. And the final verdict is not yet in as to whether our attempt to narrate the past in ever more elaborate forms has simply brought about a diversification and rearrangement of the old historical edifice. But beyond Gatterer’s influence on historical methodology and periodization, his history as science substantiates something that, in my view, is far more important than the issue of success or failure: his historiography showed that history could be seen in a completely new light because, in the world around him, everything had changed.

NOTES 1 Carl August Malchus, “Johann Christoph Gatterer,” in Zeitgenossen: Biographien und Charakteristiken, vol. 2, ed. Friedrich August Koethe (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1816), 189.

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2 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–1. 3 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 4 Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 113–90; Reill, “Johann Christoph Gatterer,” in Deutsche Historiker, vol. 6, ed. Hans Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980); and Reill, “History and Hermeneutics in the Aufklärung: The Thought of Johann Christoph Gatterer,” Journal of Modern History 45, no. 1 (1973): 24–51. 5 Reill, “Gatterer,” 11. 6 Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012). 7 On ars historica, see Grafton, History. 8 On geography and chronology as eyes of historiography, see Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 33; Walter Goffart, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 104n141; and Grafton, History, 92. 9 Frank E. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963); on chronology, see Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 10 Johann Christoph Gatterer, Abriss der Chronologie (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1777). 11 Johann Christoph Gatterer, Abriss der Geographie (1775), 3–4; Gatterer, Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie, zur Erläuterung seiner synchronistischen Tabellen, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 1771), 2; on universal geography, see Anne Maria Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 89–103. 12 Gatterer, Abriss der Geographie; Gatterer, Kurzer Begriff der Geographie (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1789). 13 On Gatterer as historical cartographer, see Walter Goffart, “The Plot of Gatterer’s Charten zur Geschichte der Völkerwanderung,” in Geschichtsdeutung auf alten Karten: Archäologie und Geschichte, ed. Dagmar Unverhau (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003); Goffart, Atlases, 168–73. 14 The maps were never published. They were coloured by his daughters and sold – if at all – in his geography lectures. For this reason, only one of the medieval maps has survived. For further details, see Gierl, Geschichte, 236–7. There are two collections of Gatterer’s maps in the SUB Göttingen under

42

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26

Martin Gierl the title “Johann Christoph Gatterer”: “Atlas II, Kleine Special-Chärtchen: Zur Verwendung im Kolleg zur Universalhistorie” (s.l., s.a.) and “Atlas I. 1789.” The examples are part of this collection, which consists of nine maps. Nine of Gatterer’s geopolitical maps can still be seen in Göttingen University’s library. Benjamin Steiner, Die Ordnung der Geschichte: Historische Tabellenwerke in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008). Ibid., 121–4. Ibid., 144–53, 254. Ibid., 248–51. Johann Christoph Gatterer, Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis, quarum duae in aes incisae coloribus illustratae sunt, comprehensa et regio instituto historico Gottingensi oblata (Göttingen, 1766), accessed 1 January 2013, http://gso. gbv.de/DB=2.1/PPNSET?PPN=718772261; on the general, the particular, and the special as divisions of history, see Peter Hanns Reill, “Das Problem des Allgemeinen und des Besonderen im geschichtlichen Denken und in den historiographischen Darstellungen des späten 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Theorie der Geschichte, vol. 6, ed. Karl Acham and Winfried Schulze (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1990). Reill, Vitalizing Nature. For more detail, see Martin Gierl, “Das Alphabet der Natur und das Alphabet der Kultur im 18. Jahrhundert: Botanik, Diplomatik, Linguistik und Ethnographie nach Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer und Christian Wilhelm Büttner,” in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaft, Technik und Medizin 18, no. 1 (2010): 1–27. Carl von Linné, Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales: Secundum numerum, figuram, situm, proportionem omnium fructificationis partium (Leiden: Wishoff, 1737), Ratio operis §11; ibid., annex, the figure “Caroli Linnaei Classes S. Literae.” Charles François Toustain and René Prosper Tassin, Nouveau traité de diplomatique, où l’on examine les fondemens de cet art par deux religieux Bénédictins de la Congrégation de S. Maur, 6 vols. (Paris: Desprez & Cavelier, 1750–65), especially vol. 2. Gierl, Geschichte, 198. Johann Christoph Gatterer, Praktische Diplomatik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1799), 167–71; Gatterer, “Commentatio diplomatica de methodo aetatis codicum manuscriptorum definiendae,” in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores: Commentationes historicae et philologicae classis 8 (1799), 93–5.

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27 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Amsterdam: La Compagnie 1749), 324; on the debate on climate, see Lucas Marco Gisi, Einbildungskraft und Mythologie: Die Verschränkung von Anthropologie und Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 80–101. 28 Johann Christoph Gatterer, “De anno meteorologico fundamentali commentatio lecta d. 18. Nov. 1780,” in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores: Commentationes classis physicae 3 (1781). 29 “Ex his, quae hactenus dicta sunt, quilibet intelliget, pleniorem anni alicujus meteorologici historiam a nemine huc usque, praeterquam a me, scriptam esse,” ibid., 91. 30 Ibid., 92; on Brander, see Alto Brachner, ed., G.F. Brander, 1713–1783: Wissenschaftliche Instrumente aus seiner Werkstatt (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 1983); on Hollmann’s meteorological observations between 1741 and 1753, see Gustav Hellmann, “Die Entwicklung der meteorologischen Beobachtungen in Deutschland von den ersten Anfängen bis zur Errichtung staatlicher Beobachtungsnetze,” in Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phys.-Math. Klasse (1926), 17. 31 Gatterer, “De anno,” 90. 32 For Sweden, see Gatterer, Abriss der Geographie, 134. 33 See Gatterer, “De anno,” 116–20. 34 Petra Feuerstein-Herz, Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann (1743–1815) und die Tiergeographie (PhD diss., Technische Universität Braunschweig, 2004), 40, accessed 2 January 2013, http://opus.tu-bs.de/opus/ volltexte/2005/647. 35 Andreas Mehl, “Geschichtsschreibung in und über Rom,” in Die antike Historiographie und die Anfänge der christlichen Geschichtsschreibung, ed. EveMarie Becker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 128–36; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Die Ursprünge der Universalhistorie,” in Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung, vol. 1, ed. Glenn W. Most (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998). 36 Gatterer discussed this in his pivotal article on historiography: Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Vom historischen Plan,” in Allgemeine historische Bibliothek von Mitgliedern des königlichen Instituts der historischen Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 1 (1767), 15–89, re-edited by Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer in Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärungshistorie, vol. 2 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1990), 621–62. 37 For a more detailed look, see the tables online: http://digitale.bibliothek. uni-halle.de/vd18/content/structure/5862204. 38 On “pragmatic historiography,” see Reill, “Gatterer,” 11–14; Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft, 1760–1860 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), 59–65.

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39 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 118–21. 40 Ibid., 122–8. 41 Gatterer, Einleitung, 2, 26. 42 Ibid., 1–2, 25–31. 43 Frank Rexroth, “Das Mittelalter und die Moderne in den Meistererzählungen der historischen Wissenschaften,” in Erfindung des Mittelalters, ed. Manfred Engel and Wolfgang Haubrichs (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 14–15; Reinhart Koselleck, “Moderne Sozialgeschichte und historische Zeiten,” in Theorie der modernen Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Pietro Rossi (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 178.

chapter two

An Epicurean Democracy in Language: The volte face in Johann David Michaelis’s Early Career AV I L I F S C H I T Z

On 31 May 1759, the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres crowned the Göttingen orientalist Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) with its annual prize, a decision that may have raised a few eyebrows across Europe.1 The Academy – reformed by Frederick the Great and headed by the French philosophe Maupertuis – had chosen the reciprocal influence of language on opinions and opinions on language as the subject of its 1759 public contest. The question, as advertised, was inspired by two fashionable discourses: the mutual emergence of language and mind, and the genius of language – the correspondence of vernaculars to their speakers’ collective spirit.2 Such French essays on the emergence of language usually followed the ancient Epicurean account, portraying the evolution of speech and society as a natural response to human needs, fears, and social interaction. The 1759 prize laureate was, however, a German professor of a Pietist and Wolffian background, influenced to a significant extent by Christian Wolff, Albrecht von Haller, and Robert Lowth. At first glance, it is not clear what could have endeared Michaelis’s essay to academicians acquainted with the conjectural histories of Rousseau and Maupertuis – or why Michaelis, whose orientalist ancestors accorded to Hebrew a special status, should resort to a naturalistic or Epicurean account of language and its origins. This essay attempts to answer the question by tracing a major shift in Michaelis’s view of Hebrew, which triggered a wholesale change in his theory of the evolution of language and human civilization in general. Michaelis launched his career in the early 1740s with a defence of the long-held Protestant thesis about the exceptional antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points and accents; by the late 1750s, he presented a very

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different account of Hebrew as a natural language, evolving and changing like any other. The first two sections of this essay trace Michaelis’s shift from his initial endorsement of the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points, based on confessional and ancestral scholarship, to a firm view of language as the malleable product of a living community. The essay concludes with an exposition of Michaelis’s mature philosophy of language, a naturalistic thesis of the interrelations between speech and cognition, which shared several tenets with contemporary French essays on the origins of mankind. My main focus is, therefore, not on Michaelis’s biblical scholarship but rather on his anthropological and philosophical musings on the links between human speech and cognition and their mutual evolution. This is not a discussion of Michaelis’s substantial contribution to the formation of the cultural artefact, which Jonathan Sheehan has called “the Enlightenment Bible,” nor of his contribution to modern German orientalism – important aspects of Michaelis’s œuvre that have been extensively examined.3 More light should, however, be shed on Michaelis’s involvement in Enlightenment debates on the evolution of language and mind – an issue of great significance to his views on history, which were so effectively examined by Peter Reill.4 Michaelis’s major statement on this front, his 1759 prize-winning essay on the reciprocal influence of language and opinions, has not attracted much scholarly attention, even if its originality was certainly not lost on his contemporaries.5 It was avidly read in Königsberg, Berlin, Paris, and London and found some enthusiastic reception even in the young United States. Michaelis, as we shall see, also provided the Berlin Academy with the topic of the famous 1771 contest on the origins of language, to be won by Herder. Yet his 1759 essay not only exemplified his volte face concerning the Hebrew language; it also deserves further attention due to its strong political and philosophical overtones, especially its recurring references to democracy and Epicureanism, which make it a rather peculiar treatise within his largely conservative body of work.

The Special Status of Ancient Vowel Points Born in 1717 into a family of academic orientalists, Johann David Michaelis was first educated privately by his father, Christian Benedict Michaelis (1680–1764), a professor of theology and oriental languages at the University of Halle. Michaelis père’s views on oriental languages, and particularly Hebrew, had been moulded by the theological concerns

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of the first generation of Pietist reformers. He was one of the leading teachers at the Collegium Orientale Theologicum, originally founded in 1702 by August Hermann Francke and headed by his uncle, Johann Heinrich Michaelis (1668–1738). In 1728, an Institutum Judaicum with its own printing press was added to the Collegium; in both institutions, students could learn Semitic languages such as biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Chaldean, Samaritan, and Ethiopian (Amharic) alongside modern oriental languages like Turkish, Persian, and Chinese.6 The most significant project undertaken by Johann Heinrich Michaelis, a new annotated edition of the Old Testament, had been published in Halle in 1720 and was to exert considerable influence on his great-nephew’s future undertakings.7 The foundation of both the Collegium Orientale Theologicum and the Institutum Judaicum had been firmly grounded in the missionary zeal of Halle Pietism, as represented by Johann Heinrich Callenberg (1694–1760), a close collaborator of both Johann Heinrich and Christian Benedict Michaelis; a considerable number of Hebrew teachers at Halle and other German universities were Jewish converts to Christianity.8 In early eighteenth-century Halle, the foremost view on Hebrew was a common Protestant thesis seeing it as the oldest language, self-contained and not sullied by other tongues. This stance, deeply rooted in postReformation debates over the reliability of the biblical text, was espoused by the young Johann David Michaelis in his doctoral dissertation at Halle on the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points and accents (1739). Michaelis’s dissertation, written under his father’s supervision, may be seen as simply a contribution to a venerable family tradition; his great-uncle had already written a popular Hebrew grammar and a treatise on the accents in the Old Testament.9 Yet by vindicating the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points, the young Michaelis also delved straight into the depths of a confessional controversy troubling European scholars ever since the Reformation. The initial absence of letters signifying vowels in the Hebrew script confronted Protestant theologians with an acute problem. Vowels are indicated in Hebrew by diacritical marks placed below, above, and within the letters, so that the same cluster of consonants can have very different meanings according to the position of its vowel points. However, Luther’s sola scriptura principle and the emphasis on the direct impact of the biblical text on individual readers required a stable and reliable version of the Bible. In the case of the Old Testament, most Lutherans accepted as immutable and divinely inspired the sixteenth-century Venetian edition

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of the Pentateuch (1525), vowel-pointed according to the established Jewish convention, the Masorah.10 Catholic scholars, on the other hand, tended to assert the necessary role of the Church as an institutional interpreter of scripture by undermining the authority of the biblical Hebrew text. One of the Catholic strategies was to argue that vowel points had been added to the Hebrew consonantal version at a late stage, not fixed by Ezra the Scribe and his Great Synagogue in the fifth century BC, as accepted by the Jewish tradition. This argument had serious implications since the addition, change, or removal of vowel points could alter the meaning of entire sentences in the Old Testament. The Catholic stance implied that rabbinic scholars could have tampered with the biblical text in response to Jewish-Christian controversies. Although mainstream Catholic scholars did not attribute the authorship or editorship of the entire Pentateuch to Ezra or later figures, they did argue for the primacy of the Vulgate Latin translation over the Hebrew original by maintaining that errors, deliberate or inadvertent, had occurred in the process of vocalization, when vowel points were added to the Old Testament.11 It was therefore crucial for Protestant scholars to defend the reliability and antiquity of the sixteenth-century Hebrew text and its vowel points, which Luther had used in translating the Old Testament into German. One of the primary defenders of the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points was the Protestant Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564– 1629). By arguing that it was Ezra and his Great Synagogue who had fixed the Hebrew text, including the vowel points, Buxtorf subjected philology to confessional ends, trying to counter Catholic claims about the late origin of the vowel points that had made them prone to wilful or innocent misinterpretations.12 Despite Buxtorf’s reputation as the foremost contemporary Hebraic scholar, Louis Cappel (1585–1658), a Huguenot lecturer at the academies of Saumur and Sedan, challenged his thesis. Unlike Buxtorf, Cappel admitted the Septuagint and other Greek versions of the Bible as evidence that the Hebrew text had been unpointed at the time of translation. Cappel wished to reclaim the argument about the late origin of the vowel points for the Protestant cause by demonstrating that reliable meaning could be attributed to the consonantal text without recourse to the authority of the Catholic Church. Such a stable and firm interpretation had to be determined by reading passages in both their immediate and more general contexts.13 As a doctoral student, Johann David Michaelis was well aware of the long controversy over the Hebrew vowel points. In his dissertation, he

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tried to counter Cappel’s thesis, controversial in Protestant circles ever since its publication, with a wide array of sources from the Middle Ages to contemporary scholars.14 Despite some reservations, his overall defence of Buxtorf’s view of the antiquity of the vowel points placed him in the traditional Protestant camp alongside his father and great-uncle. It is important, however, to emphasize that the orientalists of the Michaelis clan had strayed from the topical Renaissance discussion of Hebrew as the original language and its divine origin. Such questions, as Christian Benedict Michaelis had stated, were not relevant to the philological study of Hebrew.15 However, both Johann Heinrich and Christian Benedict Michaelis had endorsed the Protestant view that the Hebrew vowel points were exceptionally ancient. Johann Heinrich Michaelis’s Hebrew grammar had begun, for example, with the assertion that “the ancient Hebrews wrote just as they spoke; and especially in the Bible they made an effort to express with convenient signs everything related to pronunciation.”16 In 1741, his great-nephew, Johann David, published in Halle his first book, a treatise on the Hebrew accents based on his doctoral dissertation. Prefaced by his father, Anfangs-Gründe der hebräischen Accentuation (The basics of Hebrew accentuation) was a clearly presented textbook, yet it concluded with a robust argument in defence of the antiquity of the vowel points and all diacritical marks in Hebrew. Despite his father’s qualms about the early publication (the author was only twenty-four at the time), this was very much a family venture. Christian Benedict Michaelis used the preface to defend the Hebrew textbook by Johann Heinrich Michaelis against a recent critic, while introducing the treatise in which his son (and former doctoral student) followed in the footsteps of the venerated great-uncle.17 Towards the end of this treatise, Johann David Michaelis reviewed the traditional battleground between Protestants and Catholics concerning the antiquity of the vowel points. He then opted for his great-uncle’s thesis that the vowel points had always existed in Hebrew, long before Ezra the Scribe. First, Michaelis noted that Ezra had never mentioned his alleged innovation in the biblical book he composed – while he would have been expected to do so given its far-reaching hermeneutic ramifications. Second, Michaelis asserted that the traditional Jewish account of Ezra’s introduction of the vowel points could not be trusted. Yet his most substantial arguments against the Catholics’ (and Cappel’s) claims for the novelty of the vowel points were based on a holistic view of language and its functions. For the young Michaelis, it was simply inconceivable

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that a language could be created or invented without the full apparatus familiar to him from the Latin script – namely, letters representing both consonants and vowels. It was impossible, Michaelis argued, that whoever came up with the signs for consonants did not see the necessity of expressing vowels by similar notation. If the comparative Semitic philologists of eighteenth-century Europe could read unpointed Hebrew texts only with extreme difficulty, it was clear to Michaelis that the challenge must have been all the greater at the time of the ancient Israelites and the Phoenicians. The latter, using a cognate Semitic language, could not have embarked on their maritime commercial endeavours without the vowel points enabling smooth communication with speakers of other tongues.18 Following these arguments about the inventors of language and the convenience of its use, Michaelis turned to what may be termed an argument from perfection. The Hebrew vowel points were so well ordered, endowing the consonantal letters with such a natural sense, that one could not possibly ascribe their introduction to “new and blind Jews.” By the Middle Ages, Michaelis argued, the Jews had lived for a long time with a faded tradition and with an unspoken Hebrew, and hence they were incapable of producing such a linguistic feat as the vowel points. Had the points been introduced into Hebrew so late, Michaelis asserted, they would have been much more “confused.” However, Michaelis’s opponents could have readily agreed with his case for the perfection of the vowel points, arguing that an uncouth people at the dawn of history could not have used such a device. Michaelis retorted by noting that not all of the ancient Israelites were “unlearned,” singling out the prophet Amos’s use of a cultivated and delicate style despite his poverty. He also noted that the ancient Hebrews at the time of Moses were not as coarse and unrefined as Homer’s Greeks.19 Finally, the young Michaelis promised his readers a much more elaborate essay vindicating the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points, a promise he would later be relieved not to have fulfilled.20

A Turn to Naturalism and Empiricism As Michaelis let his first book be reprinted in 1753, we can assume that his change of heart concerning the antiquity and special status of the vowel points was completed only in the mid-1750s.21 From 1757 on, Michaelis frequently criticized any exceptional treatment of Hebrew and its vowel points. This was part of his assault on Renaissance scholars and

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their eighteenth-century followers, who, inspired by the biblical account of Adam’s language, were trying to recover a bygone correspondence between words and reality.22 Michaelis’s critique was levelled at scholars who tried to trace the vestiges of such an Adamic idiom either in European vernaculars or in ancient languages such as Hebrew and Scythian. The target here was a mélange of Christian Hebraism, religious millenarianism, combinatorial and mnemonic arts, the Kabbalah, and the seventeenth-century search for “real characters.”23 Michaelis was particularly concerned to refute what he called the “hieroglyphic thesis,” a quasi-Kabbalistic view of language. His critique was elaborated in his 1757 treatise on the study of Hebrew, Beurtheilung der Mittel, welche man anwendet, die ausgestorbene hebräische Sprache zu verstehen (Assessment of the means used to understand the dead Hebrew language). “Hieroglyphic” interpreters ascribed first meanings to the Hebrew letters independently of their combination or context. For example, the letter Aleph (‫ )א‬represented action and movement, while Beth (‫ )ב‬allegedly denoted three-dimensional bodies; words were clusters of basic significations constructed out of letters according to their coalesced meanings.24 While mentioning Friedrich Christian Koch (1718–84) and Caspar Neumann (1648–1715) as advocates of this theory, Michaelis referred to a broader scholarly tradition – namely, the view that Hebrew was extraordinarily exempt from constant change, a universal feature of human language. Michaelis noted that in Hebrew, as in all other tongues, one could discern orthographic changes, contraction of forms, and various registers employed to denote similar objects at different times. The empirical observation of natural linguistic change would, according to Michaelis in 1757, suffice to refute the hieroglyphic theory, with clear consequences. The Hebrew of the Old Testament could not have been Adam’s God-given language due to the myriad modifications it must have undergone since Creation – if it had ever been a perfect, essence-revealing language.25 Although Michaelis did not refer directly to the antiquity of the vowel points, his stance in 1757 ran contrary to his views around 1740 about the exceptional antiquity of the Hebrew accents and vowel points and their relative lack of change over millennia as well as his erstwhile assumption that these diacritical marks had already been in use at the time of Moses. Michaelis’s attempt to refute the Kabbalistic-hieroglyphic view of Hebrew led him to an extensive discussion of the origin of language, an endeavour he would soon complement with his prize-winning essay on language and opinions. His pivotal arguments against the hieroglyphic

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theory were that all languages had been spoken before they were written; that the first and basic units of language were syllables, not letters or single consonants; and that words emerged naturally over time without intentional design.26 Michaelis recommended a methodological, empirical approach to the question of linguistic origins, consisting either in an examination of historical records (such as ancient oriental literature) or the present observation of language acquisition by children and the impaired.27 In a manner similar to the accounts by Epicurus and Lucretius of the origins of language, Michaelis likened its emergence among sociable yet speechless human beings to its development in infants. The latter, he insisted, did not learn language by imitation but through vocal experimentation, a self-motivated process with minimal environmental input.28 He argued that the emergence of language followed natural trajectories dictated by material needs, overwhelming emotions, and social interaction. The space for manoeuvre available to the first speakers was further limited by human physiology, so that no premeditated correspondence between sound and meaning could have been originally devised. Michaelis’s preference for children as his “master instructors” in the origins of language over those who “philosophise in another world” was targeted at the hieroglyphic thesis, but it may also be considered as a general comment about method. Generalizations were better drawn from experience than from abstract reasoning about what was required by the perfection of language or the convenience of its speakers – the arguments Michaelis himself had used in 1741.29 This thoroughly naturalistic theory of the emergence of language would eventually lead Michaelis to acknowledge publicly the errors in his initial view of Hebrew and its vowel points. The full retraction of his youthful defence of the antiquity and immutability of the Hebrew vowel points was made in an essay published in 1769 under the title Von dem Alter der Hebräischen Vocalen, und übrigen Punkte (On the age of the Hebrew vowels, and other points). Michaelis wrote the essay to justify his frequent departure from the Masoretic vowel points in his forthcoming German translation of the Old Testament. It was his “debt to the public,” Michaelis wrote, to disown what he had asserted in his doctoral dissertation of 1739 and in the 1741 treatise. Even if the Jews had used vowel points in ancient times, as he had previously argued, those that were included in modern editions of the Bible were a new “Masoretic invention.”30 Reviewing once again the confessional debate, Michaelis categorically rejected any theological presuppositions. In stark contrast to his father, his great-uncle, and his own early views, Michaelis criticized

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any case for the antiquity of the vowel points based on God’s foreknowledge, the perfection of Hebrew, or the convenience of its modern readers. Instead, Michaelis pleaded with his readers to treat the question on historical rather than theological grounds. In a historical question, concerned with what happened or did not happen, one must not resort to theological motives derived from God’s wisdom or benevolence. We are too short-sighted to see in advance what God must have done, designed, allowed or prevented. Our issue is merely historical, for the question of whether the Bible was originally written with vowel points presupposes another: have the oriental languages always had vowel points? How certain would it be to suggest so only because providence owes it to us to have formed with vowel points the alphabet of any language in which Revelation would later be given?31

From the denial that certain features of Hebrew could have been maintained throughout history, Michaelis extended his critique to the whole notion that language or its components could have ever been invented or intentionally designed. Here we find one of the tenets of Michaelis’s mature theory of linguistic evolution: emergence over a large span of time, based on necessary change through usage, trial, and error. He finally ascribed the omission of vowels to frequent use and haste, both natural impulses requiring no premeditation or conscious decision.32 Why did Michaelis make such a break with his own initial thesis? As he provided no specific reason in his public apology of 1769 or in his autobiography, one can only speculate. It is likely that the shift in his views on language was closely related to his academic endeavours in the mid- to late 1750s and their institutional setting. By 1757, when he published his treatise on Hebrew and contemplated his answer to the prize question, Michaelis had transformed himself from a young freelance teacher in his ancestral town into a widely renowned professor at Göttingen, the most innovative university at the time. He owed his initiation into the local Royal Society of Sciences to its founder, Albrecht von Haller (1708–77), whose protégé he became as a new lecturer at Göttingen.33 Haller may have been the model for Michaelis’s archetype of the classic author in his 1759 prize essay, an expert in the life sciences who applied his profound knowledge of nature to the composition of poetry in German. Haller’s own research had led him to assert a different ideal of scholarship from the contemporary division of labour between universities (dedicated to teaching and training) and royal societies (focused on

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research and discovery). According to Haller, university teachers should aspire to make new discoveries, and teaching must always be researchbased. Metaphysics, theology, and jurisprudence were excluded from the new society, but history and philology constituted an independent class, reflecting Haller’s vision of these disciplines as “sciences which promise the widening of knowledge and discoveries through observations, experiments, deep understanding of nature, and the application of the known unto the unknown.”34 After Haller’s early departure for Bern (1753), Michaelis propagated his mentor’s notion of scholarship in his own academic activities and as secretary and director of the Göttingen Royal Society. Vestiges of this conviction may be perceived in a project he was pursuing at the time he was working on his 1759 essay and its extended French version: a scientific expedition to the Arabian peninsula. The idea, which Michaelis had first suggested in 1756 to the Danish foreign minister, was to examine the biblical accounts of Middle Eastern fauna, flora, customs, rites, and miracles.35 Equipped with royal Danish patronage and trained by Michaelis, the explorers embarked on their voyage in January 1761, although, by 1763, all but Carsten Niebuhr had died in the East. Niebuhr finally returned to Europe in 1767, publishing his Beschreibung von Arabien (Description of Arabia) in 1772.36 This ill-fated expedition was unique in the landscape of eighteenth-century scientific voyages. While earlier expeditions had been tasked with putting scientific theories to practical test or gathering information on unknown territories as a prelude for trade and colonization, Michaelis’s idea was to explore a region relatively close to Europe for the roots of Western civilization itself. The Arabian Peninsula and its inhabitants, allegedly maintaining some original biblical features, were supposed to yield insights into the obscure origins of language, civilization, and law.37 Reviewing Michaelis’s writings posthumously, the Göttingen scholar Johann Gottlob Eichhorn (1752–1827) identified a significant turn in his scholarship in the early 1750s.38 It seems that, in this period, the academic environment in Göttingen was particularly conducive to some of the ideas that Michaelis had received during a sojourn in England in the early 1740s, where he was assistant to the German preacher at the Chapel Royal of St James. His time in England, from April 1741 until September 1742, included a month in Oxford, which Michaelis later remembered as “the most delightful time of my life.”39 He considered himself fortunate to attend the second of Robert Lowth’s lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews. Although he did not approach Lowth at the time, this was the beginning of a close alliance between the two.

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Lowth (1710–87), professor of poetry at Oxford from 1741 until 1750, later Bishop of London, delivered thirty-four lectures on Hebrew poetry throughout his tenure, published as De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones by the Clarendon Press in 1753. The second lecture, attended by Michaelis, laid out the design of the entire series, legitimizing the application of general aesthetic criteria to biblical poetry.40 Lowth argued that poetry should be treated not as a product of reason but as a work of nature, organically stimulated in man’s mind upon his creation. In further lectures, Lowth elaborated his influential view of the poet as a prophet and the prophet as a poet. Oriental poetry was written, according to Lowth, in an enthusiastic, parabolic mode still discernible in modern music and dance: content and form were closely intertwined in this style, which was rich in sensual representations of nature.41 Lowth evoked an image of the first human beings employing a primordial language for the immediate expression of the sublime, untouched by contemplation or premeditation. In the field of biblical criticism, Lowth’s main contribution was his analysis of parallelism, the expression of the same idea by analogous members of two (or more) groups of words (as in Genesis 4:23, according to the King James translation: “Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt”). Lowth’s turn to parallelism and away from verse and metre was justified by his reference to the absence of vowels in written Hebrew. His views on the issue contrasted sharply with the tradition that the young Michaelis adhered to in his recently published first book, for Lowth regarded the Hebrew vowel points as a late, untrustworthy invention, following Cappel rather than Buxtorf.42 The lack of a reliable vocalization of the Hebrew Bible led Lowth to search for poetic value in its syntax and figurative vocabulary, and therefore to parallelism as the paradigmatic feature of biblical poetry.43 This scholarly synthesis fascinated Michaelis, who edited and annotated Lowth’s lectures in two volumes, published in Göttingen in 1758 and 1761. Although not accepting all of Lowth’s observations, Michaelis praised him as a prodigious interpreter of oriental poetry.44 Furthermore, by the late 1750s, Michaelis’s reputation as a leading researcher had been established to the extent that foreign scholars made a special pilgrimage to Göttingen to consult him on all matters oriental. In 1757, a year before Michaelis began to write his entry for the Berlin contest, he gave a series of private tutorials to Olaus Rabenius, a professor of law at the University of Uppsala. Michaelis would publish the work

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that originated in these tutorials only in the early 1770s as a six-volume work entitled Mosaisches Recht (Mosaic law).45 The work discussed ancient Jewish law while analysing social, agricultural, and commercial practices. It was not intended merely for philologists, orientalists, and confessional apologists; Michaelis addressed his work specifically to statesmen and civil servants interested in the general evolution of legal systems. It is in this respect that Michaelis saw Montesquieu as his main inspiration, although his language also betrayed a debt to Leibniz, Wolff, and the application of their philosophy to historical scholarship by the pioneers of the so-called Göttingen School of history (particularly Chladenius and the young Gatterer).46 Like them, Michaelis believed that a historical phenomenon, be it a singular event, a social custom, or a legislative act, must be seen within a Wolffian nexus rerum, or Zusammenhang – the mutual connection and agreement of facts, which wove them into a harmonious whole. Only by delving into the intricate relations among environmental, social, and intellectual factors could human interpreters attain sufficient knowledge of their subject.47 As in the case of the Arabian expedition, Michaelis wished to show that the familiar Bible could endow its readers with unexpected insights, relativizing their social and legal systems and contributing to a deeper understanding of contemporary society. Such an approach prized empirical observation, as testified to by the eighteenth-century fascination with travel reports on American and Pacific civilizations. For Michaelis, the nomadic Bedouins fulfilled a similar role, still living in the tents of Abraham in a region where history virtually stood still.48 Given this background, it is difficult to underestimate the significance of Michaelis’s public withdrawal of his initial endorsement of the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel points and accents. For a scholar celebrated across Europe as a distinguished orientalist, this could not have been an easy confession, all the more so as Michaelis was known to be particularly concerned with his public image. It seems that the widespread recognition bestowed on him following the French translation of his prizewinning essay (1762), perhaps also his father’s death (1764), enabled Michaelis to be more open about his change of mind and publicly disclaim his ancestral legacy.49 In later years, he would criticize his greatuncle’s “blind enthusiasm” for the Masoretic text of the Bible and his father’s penchant for unsound etymologies as well as wider scholarly practices in the Halle of the 1740s.50 However, even without explicit references to his own early work, Michaelis’s mature views of language and its role in human society were amply manifest in his 1759 essay.

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Linguistic Democracy versus Scholarly Despotism Michaelis’s prize-winning essay demonstrated the close affinity between two contemporary enquiries: into the origins of language and into the mutual influence of language and cognition. Within the reigning midcentury conceptual framework, there was no great difference between these two issues. Language was seen as naturally evolving in tandem with all higher mental operations of the human mind, on the assumption that, in prehistoric times, human beings were animal-like brutes devoid of reason and language. This Epicurean history of civilization, as appropriated by Enlightenment authors such as Condillac and Rousseau, necessitated an investigation of the mutual origins of language and mind if one wished to account for their synchronic interdependence. Alternatively, it made the importance of language for thinking and of mental operations for the use of language an indispensable issue in enquiries into their origin.51 Indeed, the 1759 prize question equated the operations of the human mind with “opinions,” a term that had traditionally implied uncertain knowledge. This identification of uncertain knowledge with our common thought processes exemplified the Enlightenment thesis of the indispensability of language for human thought and action.52 Well aware of this theoretical link, Michaelis – virtually alone among the contestants in 1759 – confined himself to the actual question, the reciprocal influence of language and opinions (generally understood as human thinking). Acknowledging that the interrelations between language and thought could not be completely described without an investigation of their joint origins, Michaelis suggested that the Berlin Academy dedicate a different contest to the question of how a fully fledged language could have ever emerged among initially speechless human beings. The Academy would take up his suggestion almost verbatim as its prize question for 1771 on the origin of language.53 At the outset of his entry, written in late 1758, Michaelis made it clear that he subscribed, as in his treatise on Hebrew of the previous year, to the thesis that all languages were natural creations of communities of speakers. No language was exempt from the grind of constant use, abuse, change, and exchange. As in the Epicurean-Lucretian narrative, words first expressed the physical aspects of objects that struck the first speakers most vividly. The first motive attracting attention to nature’s abundant phenomena was, above all, their utility for human beings. It was only subsequent change, superimposed on these original sounds over a very

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long time, that made words look arbitrary in our eyes.54 Michaelis was not at all disturbed by the fact that language, as an indispensable instrument of thought, could reflect or lead to epistemological mistakes and errors of judgment. He actually celebrated the contingent and impure nature of historically evolved languages: “This is how thousands of men contribute their contingency to the immense mass of truths and errors of which national languages are depositors.” As Michaelis further noted, we use libraries while being aware that not all of the items stored there are reliable beyond doubt; language is just such a rich yet uncertain treasury of knowledge.55 Michaelis’s depiction of all languages as containing something natural in their origins, based on their speakers’ first reaction to their environment, rendered his essay a manifesto for the use of vernaculars – and particularly German. It may have been surprising to find a scholar of “dead” Semitic languages, deeply influenced by his colleagues’ study of the classical languages, espousing the teaching of the sciences in German and criticizing the use of Latin in the Republic of Letters.56 These were, however, some of Michaelis’s main points in his essay, which was strewn with political metaphors. As he now saw language as a natural artefact crafted through common use, its master must be the entire speech community. Following Horace’s claim that usage is the supreme law of language, Michaelis went further and declared that “language is, in a word, a democracy, where the will of the majority determines usage.”57 The right to create new words or change their common usage belonged, according to Michaelis, to “the people who is the sovereign legislator” and to two groups of people in particular: women and “classic authors.” Only poets and other creative writers could be counted as members of the latter group, and here again it was the people, the “sovereign legislator,” who decided who was to become a classic author. This was, therefore, not an anarchic democracy but a well-ordered and well-functioning one. Every person could contribute to it through constant use, but her or his influence remained trivial and diluted in the general stream of everyday speech. Respect was paid to merit and education, resulting in the emulation of classic authors. “There is one point where the empire of language seems to distance itself from democracy,” Michaelis conceded, referring to the deference of the common people to classic authors. “Yet isn’t it so in all democratic states?” he wondered, concluding that “nothing obliges us to abandon a comparison that represents so well what it has to represent.”58 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Michaelis saw linguistic or political democracy as

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neither a dictatorship of the mediocre masses nor a realm of essential disorder.59 Michaelis defended this benign, merit-based character of linguistic democracy – and, by extension, his particular vision of political democracy – throughout his essay, as he must have been aware of the overtones of his forthright and repeated espousal of this problematic term. He was sufficiently familiar with works by ancient authors, as well as with contemporaries such as Montesquieu, Hume, and Rousseau, to know that the image of ancient democracy was a highly controversial topic.60 Similar emphases are discernible in his other works. In the 1757 treatise on Hebrew, for example, Michaelis proclaimed that the European Republic of Letters operated under the “rights of a democracy,” and in Mosaisches Recht, he conceived of the ancient Jewish polity as a republic turned into a limited, quasi-constitutional monarchy.61 It is important to note who was cast in the essay as the arbitrary tyrant, an anti-democratic rogue. This role was reserved for none other than professional scholars, mostly academics, such as Michaelis himself and his ancestors. A scholar, Michaelis argued, could condemn the common way of speaking about the sunrise and the sunset by declaring that Berlin sets in the evening rather than the sun – for, after all, it is the earth, with Berlin on its surface, that revolves around the sun. Such a scholar would, however, be rightly denounced as a pedant even if the scientific truth was on his side. The generic figure of the scholar featured several times in his essay as the perfect linguistic villain, wishing to impose on his or her surroundings an unnatural way of speaking and thinking. The use of arbitrariness here is significant as Michaelis took the scholar’s dictates to be as arbitrary as the edicts of a political despot, undermining the genuine democracy that was language. Scholars, “perhaps the hundredth part of humanity,” were theoretically prejudiced and thus could not see what the common people perceived clearly. By contrast, the exemplary figures capable of seeing the world as it is were illiterate people, whom Michaelis regarded as closer to nature than scholars; heretics, who could usually think more freely and widely than the orthodox; and infants, who were relatively free of prejudices.62 Even among enlightened nations, we should distinguish, Michaelis proposed, those that produced many scholars from others where the majority of the nation was enlightened.63 Michaelis’s grim view of scholarly language, codifying dictionaries and prescriptive manuals was manifest in his attack on two particularly great evils, arbitrary scientific classification and projects for the creation of a universal language. He saw Linnaeus’s recent designation of all flora and

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fauna by binary Latin names as a most barbarous invention, depriving the scholarly world of the riches accumulated in traditional folk wisdom and nomenclature.64 Michaelis feared much of the same in other new taxonomies as well as in older projects for universal languages. His main grievance was that they all lacked the consensual character of a naturally and historically evolved language, and therefore they amounted to the despotic imposition of a single person’s point of view, or that of a sect, on the common people. The idioms invented by Linnaeus or Adanson would, he feared, lead to a new scholarly Babel, “which is prevented by the democratic form of our ordinary languages”65 – and hence Michaelis’s plea to teach botany in the vernacular rather than in Latin. More generally, when it came to the improvement of language, scholars had to be kept at arm’s length. Any prescriptive rule would infringe on “the rights of the people.” I also believe that the scholar is obliged to behave like every other individual in the empire of language. It is not for him to give the law or proscribe customary expressions. If he risks it, he is jeered at, and merits it; this is the punishment he deserves for his ambition and his infringement on the rights of the people. Language is a Democratic State: the savant citizen has no authority at all to abolish accepted usage before he has convinced the entire nation that this usage is abusive. And if he substitutes a new term for the one commonly used to design a certain object, how can he demand to be heard?66

Michaelis’s last point, about the refusal of the majority to follow the savant’s rational neologisms, closely resembles Lucretius’s argument against there being any single inventor, divine or human, of the origins of language.67 This was an ancient rejection of Plato’s suggestion that name-givers could have coined the first words of languages. For Plato, norms of propriety could not be democratically determined, whereas the Epicureans saw no alternative to common use as the arbiter of correctness. According to Lucretius, at no point in human evolution was there a human being equipped with substantially better faculties than his peers, allowing for a superior insight into the nature of things. Even if there had been such a superior man, no one would have understood him or seen much sense in adopting the new words, however rational they might have been. Like the ancient Epicureans, Michaelis used here the universality of cognitive faculties and a utilitarian view of human evolution in order to discard the Platonic notion of privileged individuals in the realm of language.

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The prize essay is a fascinating statement not only because it clearly presented Michaelis’s naturalistic theory of language and depicted it as an open space in which the sheer weight of the whole nation prevents arbitrary, despotic intervention. His espousal of an account of language resembling the ancient Epicurean narrative was not necessarily radical. Beyond controversial figures such as Rousseau, more orthodox thinkers like Leibniz, Vico, and Warburton all expounded very similar theories of the origin of language. Yet the examples that Michaelis gave in his essay were illuminating in themselves, including recurrent condemnations of literal interpretations of scripture and, as we saw above, positive references to freethinking heretics. Although Michaelis, like most contemporary authors, did not explicitly declare his debt to the ancient Epicureans on the issue of linguistic evolution, he did pay them a public tribute in his essay. In a discussion of how accessory ideas coloured our attitude to different terms, Michaelis’s main example was the Roman vilification of Epicureanism. What had simply meant pleasurable emotion for the Hellenistic philosophers was denoted in Latin by voluptas, with its connotations of excessive lust and corruption. No wonder, Michaelis wrote, that this theory was ill received by a nation worshipping military virtue. He went on to demonstrate how he would convince a friend to see the sense of the Epicurean stance, making it wholly respectable by substituting the term angenehme Empfindung (“agreeable feeling”) for voluptas or Wollust. Once he did so, there was no need to resort to the “chicanes and bad arguments with which the Roman orator [Cicero] attacked the Greek philosopher [Epicurus].” In the same breath, Michaelis tried to distance himself rhetorically from a dangerous self-identification with a much maligned school, conceding that some Epicureans might have perhaps confused pleasant sentiments with voluptuousness.68 His ire was particularly reserved for self-appointed reformers, “who believe they perform a marvel for the public good in recommending to the citizen a sordid thriftiness,” whereas moderate luxury should be “approved by sound politics, and no state can prosper without it.”69 The 1759 prize-winning essay was immediately recognized as a significant work, perhaps the most important statement of the orientalist Michaelis on current epistemic and anthropological questions. The original German treatise did not go unnoticed or unchallenged; its reviewers included Hamann, Mendelssohn, and Herder. Yet, as Michaelis wrote in his autobiography, the essay became a milestone in his career thanks to its extended French version, published in 1762 after a close collaboration

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with the translators, Jean-Bernard Merian (deputy secretary of the Berlin Academy) and Prémontval, the Academy member who had suggested the topic for the contest.70 One copy of the essay reached d’Alembert, who frequently consulted Frederick II on academic matters after Maupertuis’s death in 1759. Following d’Alembert’s enthusiastic response to the French edition of the essay, Michaelis was offered a position at the Berlin Academy. D’Alembert also complimented him for his allegedly perfect French, which would have been the envy of any bel esprit in Paris.71 Michaelis corrected d’Alembert’s mistake, paying his translators their due, but the episode attests to the contemporary fascination with the essay far beyond the circles of German orientalists and theologians. It was further translated into English (1769) and Dutch (1771). Despite its present obscurity, the essay was widely read well into the nineteenth century and was a major influence on Noah Webster’s cultural projects in the United States – perhaps paradoxically, given Michaelis’s attitude towards prescriptive scholars.72

‫ﱶﱸ‬ By the late 1750s, in Göttingen, Michaelis had traversed a fertile intellectual path leading him away from Halle and its confessionally moulded oriental scholarship of the turn of the century. His change of mind about the Hebrew vowel points may explain why his entry for the 1759 contest appealed to readers acquainted with French accounts of the evolution of civilization and language. Michaelis resorted to naturalistic arguments about the regular emergence of Hebrew, as well as all other languages, following his rejection of two interchangeable notions: the belief that Hebrew was the original, divinely inspired tongue and the search for a perfect language reflecting the nature of things. It was, therefore, through an original critique of the views with which he had been inculcated that Michaelis arrived at conclusions similar to those expounded in conjectural histories in the Epicurean vein. Michaelis’s critical engagement with his ancestral legacy also demonstrates how innovative anthropological and social conceptions could originate in a philological debate that might have seemed antiquarian to Enlightenment observers. The early modern controversy over the Hebrew vowel points served as a launch pad for his mature theory of how linguistic signs shape the human mind, how the mind transforms these signs, and how language and understanding evolved in tandem over time. The shift in his views further indicates that not all so-called

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Epicurean or materialist assumptions necessarily undermined religious belief, as manifest in Michaelis’s career. Despite his brief flirtation with democracy and Epicurean ethics in his 1759 essay, the main bulk of his scholarship displayed moderate conservatism and a Montesquieuinspired appreciation of slow change over time based on accumulated layers of social and political evolution. Like many of his peers across Europe, Michaelis did not see any contradiction between his religious belief and his newly found, naturalistic account of the evolution of human civilization. When it came to the Bible, God was not in the details, and certainly not in the vowel points. As Michaelis declared in the introduction to his translation of the Old Testament, one must follow the sense rather than the letter, a lesson well earned throughout his long engagement with the Hebrew language.73 After all, it was in this entire alien yet natural idiom that Providence had first inscribed itself, not necessarily in its vowel points. The quasiEpicurean linguistic democracy in Michaelis’s prize-winning essay can be seen as complementing his thinking about Hebrew. No ancient legislator, prophet, or poet could have prevented gradual natural change, sanctioned by the sovereign people – just as an eighteenth-century scholar should not impose his own confessional and philosophical perspectives on the reading public.

NOTES 1 Johann David Michaelis, “Beantwortung der Frage von dem Einfluß der Meinungen eines Volcks in seine Sprache, und der Sprache in die Meinungen,” in Dissertation qui a remporté le prix proposé par l’académie royale des sciences et belles lettres de Prusse, sur l’influence réciproque du langage sur les opinions et des opinions sur le langage: Avec les pièces qui ont concouru (Berlin, 1760). 2 “Nouvelle bibliothèque germanique,” July–September 1757, 202–3. 3 Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), 182–217; Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 27–68; Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2009), 36–42; and Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford, 2010). Other studies concentrated on Michaelis’s attitudes towards contemporary Jews; see Anna-Ruth Löwenbrück, Judenfeindschaft im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Antisemitismus

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Avi Lifschitz am Beispiel des Göttinger Theologen und Orientalisten Johann David Michaelis (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); and Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT, 2002), 50–89. Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975). I have attempted to correct this long-standing neglect in Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2012). Christopher Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995), 47–57. Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, “Johann Heinrich Michaelis und seine Biblia Hebraica von 1720,” in Zentren der Aufklärung I: Halle – Aufklärung und Pietismus, ed. Norbert Hinske (Heidelberg, 1989), 15–64. Dominique Bourel, “Die deutsche Orientalistik im 18. Jahrhundert: Von der Mission zur Wissenschaft,” in Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow, Walter Sparn, and John Woodbridge (Wiesbaden, 1988), 113–26. Johann Heinrich Michaelis, Gründlicher Unterricht von den Accentibus prosaicis u. metricis (Halle, 1700); Erleichterte hebräische Grammatica (Halle, 1702). The vowel points were probably introduced in the last centuries of the first millennium and generally accepted by Jewish communities by the tenth century. For early modern debates concerning the vocalization of the biblical text, see Richard A. Muller, “The Debate over the Vowel Points and the Crisis in Orthodox Hermeneutics,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980), 53–72; Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 23–8; and Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 383–431. Richard Simon stood out among Catholic writers on this point (as on many others). While believing that the vowel points were a late Jewish invention, he did not conclude that the existing Hebrew text was completely unreliable: the Massoretes noted down what they saw as the traditionally received pronunciation and could not have arbitrarily introduced a new vocalization; see Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Amsterdam, 1685), 145–51 (originally published in 1678). Buxtorf’s main argument was made in Tiberias (1620), a refutation of the hypothesis expounded by the Jewish scholar Elias Levita (1468–1549) concerning the late vocalization of the Bible. See Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996), 203–28.

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13 Louis Cappel, ‫ סוד הניקוד נגלה‬Hoc est Arcanum punctationis revelatum (Leiden, 1624). Cappel was not, however, the only Protestant scholar to doubt the antiquity of the vowel points. See Muller, “The Debate,” 65–70; Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 734–7; and Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 307–28. 14 J.D. Michaelis, Dissertatio inauguralis de punctorum hebraicorum antiquitate, sub examen vocans (Halle, 1739). 15 Christian Benedict Michaelis, preface to J.D. Michaelis, Anfangs-Gründe der hebräischen Accentuation, nebst einer kurzen Abhandlung von dem Alterthum der Accente und Hebräischen Puncte überhaupt (Halle, 1741), 8–9. 16 J.H. Michaelis, Gründlicher Unterricht, 1. 17 The critical book was Christoph Sancke’s Vollständige Anweisung zu den Accenten der Hebräer (Leipzig, 1740). For Christian Benedict Michaelis’s uncertainty about some of his son’s points, see his preface to AnfangsGründe, 25–6. The main purpose of publishing this early work was, in the eyes of the father-supervisor, precisely the vindication of the views held by Johann Heinrich Michaelis. 18 J.D. Michaelis, Anfangs-Gründe, 62–3. 19 Ibid., 61, 77–8. 20 Ibid., 78. For echoes of this debate among Jewish scholars, and especially Moses Mendelssohn, see Andrea Schatz, Sprache in der Zerstreuung: Die Säkularisierung des Hebräischen im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2009), 176–91, 241–59. On Herder’s evolving views of Hebrew, influenced to a large extent by Michaelis, see Daniel Weidner, “‘Menschliche, heilige Sprache’: Das Hebräische bei Michaelis und Herder,” Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 95 (2003): 171–206. 21 In 1769, Michaelis admitted that after 1750, he increasingly deviated from the common view about the vowel points; see “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe,” in Deutsche Uebersetzung des Alten Testaments (Göttingen, 1773), xii. 22 David S. Katz, “The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England,” in History and Imagination, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), 132–45; Allison Coudert, ed., The Language of Adam – Die Sprache Adams (Wiesbaden, 1999); and Philip Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1999), 126–42. 23 On some of these strands of thought, see Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. Stephen Clucas (Chicago, 2000); and Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge, 2007).

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24 J.D. Michaelis, Beurtheilung der Mittel, welche man anwendet, die ausgestorbene hebräische Sprache zu verstehen (Göttingen, 1757), 94, 114–17. 25 “The hieroglyphic edifice must stand or fall with the immutability of the Hebrew language. As soon as letters are eliminated or interchanged in any language, the meaning of words cannot be recovered from the hieroglyphic system, even if it had been so at the beginnings of language” (ibid., 93). 26 Ibid., 91–3, 99–101, 108–14. 27 Ibid., 101–2. 28 Ibid., 100. 29 Ibid., 103. 30 J.D. Michaelis, “Von dem Alter der Hebräischen Vocalen, und übrigen Punkte,” in Vermischte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1769), 2. 31 Ibid., 91. 32 Ibid., 103. 33 J.D. Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, von ihm selbst abgefasst (Leipzig, 1793), 41–3. 34 Richard Toellner, “Entstehung und Programm der Göttinger Gelehrten Gesellschaft unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Hallerschen Wissenschaftsbegriffes,” in Der Akademiegedanke im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Fritz Hartmann and Rudolf Vierhaus (Bremen, 1977), 104. 35 For his early ideas in the 1750s about this project, see J.D. Michaelis, Literarischer Briefwechsel, ed. Johann Gottlieb Buhle (Leipzig, 1794–96), vol. 1, esp. 297–333, 348–66. 36 Carsten Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien: Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammleten Nachrichten (Copenhagen, 1772); and Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (Copenhagen, 1774–78). On the fascinating course of the Arabian expedition, see J.D. Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, 66–76; Stig Rasmussen, ed., Carsten Niebuhr und die Arabische Reise 1761–67 (Heide, 1986); Josef Wiesenhöfer and Stephan Conermann, eds., Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) und seine Zeit (Stuttgart, 2002); and Lawrence J. Baack, Undying Curiosity: Carsten Niebuhr and the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia (1761–1767) (Stuttgart, 2014). 37 The rationale behind the expedition can be found in J.D. Michaelis, Fragen an eine Gesellschaft gelehrter Männer, die auf Befehl Ihro Majestät des Königes von Dännemark nach Arabien reisen (Frankfurt am Main, 1762). 38 Johann Gottlieb Eichhorn, “Johann David Michaelis,” Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Litteratur, vol. 3, issue 5 (Leipzig, 1791), 860. 39 J.D. Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, 29. 40 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (London, 1847), 33–4.

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41 Ibid.; see particularly Lecture 4, “On the Parabolic or Poetical Style of the Hebrews,” 48–60. 42 “It is, indeed, evident, that the true Hebrew pronunciation is totally lost. The rules concerning it, which were devised by the modern Jews many ages after the language of their ancestors had fallen into disuse, have been long since suspected by the learned to be destitute of authority and truth” (ibid., 44). 43 James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven, CT, 1998), 274–86. 44 J.D. Michaelis, “Praefatio editoris,” in Robert Lowth, De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones academicae Oxonii habitae, ed. J.D. Michaelis (Göttingen, 1758), vi. 45 J.D. Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1770–75). My references are to the 3rd Frankfurt edition of 1793. 46 Reill, German Enlightenment; Peter Hanns Reill, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Wissenschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus (Göttingen, 1985), 163–93; Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer, eds., Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärungshistorie (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990), 2 vols.; and Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2012). 47 J.D. Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht 1:1–2. See also Rudolf Vierhaus, “Montesquieu in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte seiner Wirkung als politischer Schriftsteller im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Collegium Philosophicum: Studien Joachim Ritter zum 60. Geburtstag (Basel, 1965), 403–37. 48 J.D. Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht 1:13. 49 Michaelis noted in 1769 that “prejudices about the divinity of the Jewish points” had started to weaken only “over the last few years” (Deutsche Uebersetzung, xviii). 50 J.D. Michaelis, Orientalische und Exegetische Bibliothek, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1771), 142–3; and Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, 26. 51 Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment, ch. 1–3; Lifschitz, “The Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign: Variations on an Enlightenment Theme,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 4 (2012): 537–57; and Lifschitz, “Language,” in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Aaron Garrett (Abingdon, 2014), 663–83. 52 “Nouvelle bibliothèque germanique” (July–September 1757): 202–3. 53 The prize question for 1771, announced in 1769, was, “Considering men abandoned to their natural faculties, are they in a position to invent language? By what means would they make this invention on their own?” See C.G.A. von Harnack, Geschichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der

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55 56 57

58 59

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Avi Lifschitz Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1900), 2:307. Michaelis’s suggestion in 1759 was, “How could language emerge among men who had hitherto lacked it – and how can it be developed to its present-day perfection and extension?” ( J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 78). J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 4; Michaelis, De l’influence des opinions sur le langage et du langage sur les opinions, trans. J.B. Merian and A.P. le Guay de Prémontval (Bremen, 1762), 7–8. I am juxtaposing the original essay with the revised and extended French version, published in 1762, which was the most common contemporary edition. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 6, 16–17; Michaelis, De l’influence, 11, 29–30. On Michaelis’s colleagues Gesner and Heyne, see Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 53–78. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 5; Michaelis, De l’influence, 8. Cf. Horace, “Ars poetica,” in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 456–7, lines 70–2. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 5; Michaelis, De l’influence, 9. Johann Heinrich Lambert, e.g., offered a much more negative view of language as a democracy in 1764. “In any theory of language the use in speech (Gebrauch zu reden) is presented as a tyrant, who has introduced a thousand anomalies and deviations from general rules, and to whose obstinacy language teachers and philosophers must absolutely subjugate themselves”; see Lambert, Neues Organon, vol. 2, ed. Günter Schenk (Berlin, 1990), 465. Cf. Mario Marino, “Die Sprache: Demokratie oder Tyrannei?” in Der frühe und der späte Herder: Kontinuität und/oder Korrektur, ed. Sabine Groß and Gerhard Sauder (Heidelberg, 2007), 343–53. Michaelis frequently reviewed such new works as editor of the journal Göttingische Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen. Cf. Hans Maier’s overview of the contemporary interpretation of democracy as the degeneration of political entities in “Demokratie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972), 842–3. J.D. Michaelis, Beurtheilung, 3; Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, vol. 1, dedication, *4 verso, 8, 298–325. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 15–16; Michaelis, De l’influence, 27–8. J.D. Michaelis, supplement to De l’influence, 73. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 26–32; Michaelis, De l’influence, 45–56. J.D. Michaelis, supplement to De l’influence, 171. J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 80; Michaelis, De l’influence, 148. Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book 5, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 460–1, lines 1046–55; cf. Plato, Cratylus, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN, 1998), 8–15, 387d–390e.

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68 J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 24–6; Michaelis, De l’influence, 42–5. 69 J.D. Michaelis, “Beantwortung,” 50; Michaelis, De l’influence, 98–9. 70 J.D. Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, 57–8; Avi Lifschitz, “Translation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Johann David Michaelis’s Prize Essay on Language and Opinions (1759),” in Cultural Transfer through Translation, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (Amsterdam, 2010), 29–43. 71 J.D. Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung, 59. Michaelis declined the official offer in July 1763. 72 Webster used Michaelis’s ideas and examples in his own “Dissertation Concerning the Influence of Language on Opinions and of Opinions on Language,” in A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (Boston, MA, 1790), 222–8. See V.P. Bynack, “Noah Webster’s Linguistic Thought and the Idea of an American National Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 99–114. 73 J.D. Michaelis, Deutsche Uebersetzung, xix–xxi.

chapter three

Reill’s Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie JOHN ZAMMITO

The history of science in the last generation has recognized a very important generational break, which substantially changed the orientation of science around the middle of the eighteenth century.1 Scientific enquiry shifted away from mathematical kinematics to what investigators called “experimental physics” and “natural history” – respectively, the problems of “imponderable fluids” like electricity, magnetism, chemical bonding, light, and heat, on the one hand, and the problems of “organized form,” or life, on the other.2 After 1740, natural scientists pursued the leads that Newton had offered in the Opticks by studying attraction and repulsion in chemical and electro-magnetic phenomena.3 As they did so, they began to redefine the properties of the physical world in such a way that the Cartesian notion of inert matter, and with it the Cartesian notion of mechanical cause as the impact model of force, came to seem entirely inadequate.4 It had become impossible, scientifically or philosophically, to uphold a categorical distinction between matter and force, between “inert mass” and “active principles.” And no satisfactory mechanistic account could be given for the origins or the nature of “force” as such.5 Physical scientists recognized the necessity of postulating such forces as real elements in the explanation of physical phenomena.6 Eighteenth-century science gradually substantialized the problematic forces that experiments had revealed to be operating in the physical world: light, heat, electricity, and magnetism. In his widely cited work Mechanism and Materialism, Robert Schofield characterized the new impulses in the following terms: “The materialized, substantial causes are almost all imponderable, highly tenuous fluids, and most of these are partially characterized by their possession of varying forces of attraction and repulsion.”7 For Schofield, this was how the “speculative influence

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of Newtonian matter theory was felt in chemistry and physiology.”8 He blamed this – for him inauspicious – development not on Newton, however, but on Continental influences and “religious mysticism.” In his view, these new scientists shared Bacon’s crude empiricism along with Linnaeus’s “Aristotelian contentment with the creation and categorizing of different qualities.”9 Schofield’s disgruntlement notwithstanding, the peculiar complexity but also coherence of the new mentality was grounded not in mystical excess but in problems of concrete empirical science, the difficulties of carrying on scientifically in the mechanistic mode once the physical importance of forces had to be acknowledged.10 This was not “mysticism,” but empirical science; the mechanistic version of the material world needed to be rendered dynamic – indeed, “vital.” The most sustained historical analysis of this new synthesis in the natural sciences is the work of Peter Hanns Reill. His careful exposition of the developments in the eighteenth century makes it unquestionable that a major and systematic paradigm shift arose around mid-century. In an extensive series of essays, followed by a synthesizing monograph, Reill has offered a comprehensive and persuasive account of the crystallization of a new scientific model, which he terms “Enlightenment vitalism.”11 In his view, Enlightenment vitalism had its own linguistic and intellectual form.12 Its decisive features were: first, epistemological modesty, the recognition of the severe limits of human understanding; second, the historicization of nature (and concomitantly a parallelism between the natural and the human by virtue of this historicity), leading to the acceptance of narrative description as a meaningful scientific construct (“historical science”) – e.g., in geology; and, finally, the effort to grasp nature’s complex dynamics through the combination of assiduous empirical observation and imaginative reconstruction. Conceptually, this entailed attentiveness above all to mediations between polarized categories. Enlightenment vitalism introduced a new possibility between the reductive mechanism that had dominated science since the seventeenth century and the promiscuous Renaissance animism that it had endeavoured to discard without remainder. In an essay suggestively titled “Between Mechanism and Hermeticism,” Reill demonstrates the complex strategy of the new vitalist approach to avoid both dead ends of reduction to strict mechanism and of appeal to the “occult qualities” of the Neo-Platonic/hermetic tradition. Vital materialism endeavoured instead “to create a middle realm with its own inherent structure.”13 Thus, “the principles of mechanical natural philosophy which had supported Cartesian, Leibnizian, Wolffian and early

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Newtonian science were attacked in the name of a reanimated nature filled with matter imbued with active, vital forces.”14 Reill illuminates how centrally a metaphysical commitment – mind-body dualism – had figured in the mechanistic model and how the new vitalist paradigm needed to challenge its premises. “The new mid-eighteenth century alternative to mechanism denied both of the principle [sic] characteristics of matter ascribed to it by the mechanists, namely its inert nature and its aggregative composition.”15 Since “none of the postulated active forces could be seen directly, nor could they be [directly] measured,” Reill notes, “a new form of reasoning was demanded,” a kind of semiotics: “comparative, functional analysis and analogical reasoning.”16 The scientists of the second half of the eighteenth century had “a strong commitment to close observation,” and their real contributions in physics came not in theory but in experimentation: they “designed elaborate experiments and instruments to register what was not immediately perceptible.”17 In identifying this pattern of reasoning, Reill substantiates the suggestion by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, in their study, Objectivity, that a particular style of objectivity characterized eighteenth-century science, in which interpretation entailed a measure of imaginative insight beyond the empirically given, thus bringing art and science far more closely together in the creative work of science.18 The point that arises, here, however, is that Daston and Galison do not restrict this way of reasoning in science to the eighteenth century alone, but see it carrying forward into the era of romanticism as well. Goethe, for example, was as striking an exemplar of this way of thinking about objectivity as was Diderot.19 It is this continuity that I wish to underscore, for here, I believe, Reill has affirmed too sharp a discontinuity. For all that he has captured par excellence the character of the mideighteenth-century paradigm shift, I believe Reill truncates its efficacy too sharply in seeking to confine Enlightenment vitalism “between mechanism and Romantic Naturphilosophie.”20 For Reill, Enlightenment vitalism is a historical form in itself, not to be read as the teleological anticipation of later cultural epochs. Above all, he is adamant to deny that what he has reconstructed was merely an anticipation of romanticism and Naturphilosophie. It is here that our views part company. Far from wishing to reduce Enlightenment vitalism to an anticipation of Naturphilosophie, I wish to suggest, rather, that the latter phenomenon can be justly reconstructed only as the descendant of this earlier form of scientific work and that, in a larger frame, there should be no sharp

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demarcation between the complex actuality of late Enlightenment science and the high flux that was romanticism in the sciences.21 I believe that it is crucial to rescue Naturphilosophie from a long-standing scorn that Reill seems ready to perpetuate. As Frederick Beiser observes, “Naturphilosophie has been ignored or spurned for decades, by historians of philosophy and science alike. Its reputation suffered greatly under the shadow of neo-Kantianism and positivism, which had dismissed it as a form of pseudoscience.… For many philosophers and scientists, Naturphilosophie became the very model of how not to do science.”22 Beiser affirms that “after the blossoming of the history of science in the 1970s, there has been a virtual renaissance in the subject,” but he concludes, “unfortunately, … the legacy of positivism remains, and the old image of Naturphilosophie persists to this day.”23 His assessment is apt, and it is shared entirely by Robert Richards. “Historians of nineteenth-century science, the really serious historians, usually dismiss anything sounding like Romantic science as an aberration.…”24 Reill appears to share most of the orthodox disdain. Rather than seeing Naturphilosophie as vitalism’s logical conclusion, I interpret it as its negation, as a thoroughgoing critique of the epistemological, methodological, and linguistic assumptions that undergirded Enlightenment Vitalism. Naturphilosophie’s major thrust was to dissolve the dichotomies that supported the mediations central to Enlightenment Vitalism … to return to a vision of nature based upon timeless universals …, to escape from the horror of the contingent into the ur-world of absolutes.… [Its] triumph spelled the doom of Enlightenment Vitalism’s knowledge claims.25

While Reill disputes Foucault’s sense of epistemic rupture, it is hard to see his account as anything but another version of such discontinuity.26 He insists on a “chasm” formed by “a different language of nature, accompanied by new definitions of matter, reality, scientific method, and epistemology that contradicted those proposed by Enlightenment vitalists.”27 Reill makes a sharp distinction between Immanuel Kant’s intentions (and approach) and those of Naturphilosophie.28 For Reill, Kant is closer to the Enlightenment vitalists than to the Naturphilosophen by virtue of his epistemological wariness. Actually, Kant despised Enlightenment vitalism as personified in Johann Gottfried Herder; that is why he wanted nothing to do with the “daring adventure of reason.”29 As Reill aptly notes, Kant “considered such adventures highly suspect.”30 By contrast,

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“The Naturphilosophen elevated this ‘daring adventure of reason’ into a fundamental imperative.”31 I concur with Reill on this last point, but we part company decidedly on what Naturphilosophie undertook and how it related to what went before. In a word, the “essentially contested” issue between Kant and idealist Naturphilosophie was the propriety of the “daring adventure of reason.”32 To suggest that there might be something wrong with Kant distancing himself from that adventure opens the way to reconsideration of the starkly hostile historical verdict that has found everything wrong with Naturphilosophie. I take my stand with Beiser, Richards, and a new revisionism. At long last, “there seems to be a growing consensus amongst historians of science that the division between empirical science, based on experience and experiments, and speculative Romantic Naturphilosophie, based on ideas, is an invention of the later nineteenth century.”33 It is high time to put this prejudice to rest along with all the other complacent dogmas of the positivist epoch.34 The effort to consolidate biology as a special science found positive reinforcement in the simultaneous developments within German idealist philosophy. Instead of disparaging that, it behoves us to understand it. My suggestion is that instead of viewing the closeness of emergent biology to Naturphilosophie as a contamination, we might view it as historical evidence that something essential to the character of biology as a special science was at stake, and thus this episode in the history of biology might reopen issues in the contemporary philosophy of biology. While Reill is right that “there are few historians who do not wince at some of the naturphilosophic scientific explanations,” it is disappointing that he makes no attempt to find anything constructive at all in their endeavours and instead dwells precisely on the most occultist propensities of their thought, denying it any scientific or philosophical sense.35 Reill emphasizes “the naturphilosophic quest to dematerialize the universe, reducing it to a system of signs.” While they evoked “universal mathesis,” they meant this along lines that were closer to “Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, and Leibniz” – if not, indeed, “Paracelsus and the Kabbala” – than to modern mathematical science.36 They mystified mathematics into “a new ‘creation myth,’” whereby they “sacrificed epistemological modesty at the altar of certainty.”37 His argument against the process-interpretation of their thought is not at all convincing to me, but rather has too much the aspect of a polemical send-up, however replete with citations from Lorenz Oken.38 Oken may in some measure deserve Reill’s disparagement.39 Still, Schelling and Hegel command more respect, in my view.

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And so do the practising scientists who are scarcely mentioned, although Reill acknowledges that they were inspired by this way of thought for a third of a century! In reconstructing the historical relation of Naturphilosophie to its predecessors, it is impossible for me to concur with Reill’s insulation of Herder from the Naturphilosophen, however much they themselves may have covered those particular tracks. Even Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer was a far more ambivalent figure than Reill suggests, notwithstanding his clear disavowal of the Naturphilosophen.40 He was neither the first nor the last thinker to be unhappy about what his inheritors made of his thought. (Kant, for one, comes prominently to mind!) Finally, it is deeply troubling that Reill excises Goethe and the Humboldt brothers from any part in this phenomenon, the better to render it trivial.41 It is hard to imagine, coming from a reading of Reill, that Goethe was Schelling’s patron and close intellectual collaborator in the years around 1800 or that Alexander von Humboldt publicly asserted in Schelling’s defence, “I am far from the view that the study of authentic Naturphilosophie should be damaging to empirical philosophers and that empiricists and nature-philosophers should forever repel one another as opposite poles of a magnet.”42 A striking contrast to Reill’s disdain for Naturphilosophie can be found in Robert Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life. Kant had admonished those who would undertake the “daring adventure of reason” to observe his distinction between regulative and constitutive principles.43 Yet his effort to understand specific organisms under the regulative rubric simply created more problems than it solved and, at the very least, made it necessary to resort to the idea of the teleology of nature as a whole.44 The practising scientists who followed him could not find his distinction fruitful.45 Richards puts its succinctly. “The impact of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft on the disciplines of biology has, I believe, been radically misunderstood by many contemporary historians.… Those biologists who found something congenial in Kant’s third Critique either misunderstood his project (Blumenbach and Goethe) or reconstructed certain ideas to have very different consequences from those Kant originally intended (Kielmeyer and Schelling).”46 In practising their science “after Kant, and especially because of the influence of Goethe and Schelling, biologists came to hold the teleological structure of nature not simply as if but as intrinsic.… [T]hey conceived nature in a Spinozistic fashion – it was Deus sive natura.”47 Goethe himself embraced a “Schellingian Spinozism: God, nature, and intellect are one.”48 Richards concludes: “Schelling and Goethe – and those biologists following their

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lead – [believed] that if archetypes proved a necessary methodological assumption … then there was no reason … to argue that nature was not intrinsically archetypal.”49 “The main question at stake between [Kant and Naturphilosophie] is whether rationality is something that we create and impose on the world, or whether it is something that exists within the world itself and is reflected in our own activity,” Beiser argues.50 Schelling’s aim was “to reintegrate the transcendental ‘I’ into nature, to take it outside its selfsufficient noumenal realm and to show how its reason is the expression and manifestation of the rationality inherent in nature itself.”51 In Richards’s view, “the task of Naturphilosophie (as distinct from transcendental philosophy) is to begin with a refined understanding of nature, a nature articulated with the help of the latest empirical theories, and to show how its various phenomenal relationships can be regressively chased back [to] their only possible source,” an absolute “modeled … on Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura and Plato’s Good.”52 In terms of the tradition, Schelling offered “a synthesis of the vitalism of Leibniz with the monism of Spinoza.”53 But his emphasis on dynamism transcended even their fixation on substance. “A substance or thing is never as basic as an activity because it is only the result or product of it.”54 In his full-blown Naturphilosophie, Schelling conceived of all nature as one living organism, a vast continuum of variously developed levels of organization and forces. But, “strictly speaking, … nature is not even an organism, since that would be again only the product of its activity (natura naturata). Instead, nature is nothing less than living activity or productivity itself (natura naturans).”55 Even Spinoza’s natura naturans “ceases to be dead and static but becomes alive and dynamic.”56 Here, the role of Herder proved substantial. “The younger generation followed Herder in vitalizing Spinoza’s concept of substance, which now becomes nothing less than the single cosmic force.”57 In terms of the physical sciences, above all, Naturphilosophie sought to reformulate the relation between matter and force, to reanimate the physical world. “If matter is only bare extension, and if mechanism is the paradigm of explanation, then the only options are dualism and materialism. But neither is satisfactory.”58 Thus, the “fundamental presupposition of Naturphilosophie is … the autonomy of nature, which means that the basic forces of nature must be sought within it.”59 Nature was taken to be inherently creative. Self-production in nature moved from the simpler to the more complex; it took on historical-developmental form. Emergence and process became central to the idea of nature in itself. Science needed

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to shift its attention from a set of determinate things (products) to the immanent processes that generated them: in philosophical terms, from natura naturata to natura naturans. The new generation sought a grasp of “the universe as a whole, nature in itself, the natura naturans, which subsists apart from consciousness and explains its very possibility according to necessary laws.”60 Schelling’s “Naturphilosophie attempted to know the fundamental forces of nature, the infinite productive powers of Spinoza’s natura naturans.”61 The tradition had entertained “only two options in philosophy: either we explain matter from spirit or spirit from matter. Since we cannot understand matter in itself, and since we originally understand only ourselves, we have no choice but to explain matter from spirit.”62 Such, one might say, was the sense of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” but it did not go far enough because it accepted too much of the seventeenth-century transparency of subjectivity and too much, as well, of the seventeenth-century inertness in matter. Richards cites the great late-nineteenth-century physicist Hermann von Helmholz as affirming that “seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physicists had needlessly confused their science with unanchored, abstract notions of, for instance, a bare matter having in itself no properties or forces.”63 Another important contemporary analyst of Kant and the biology of his time offers some similar observations about the connection with Naturphilosophie. In his introduction to the important collection Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology, Philippe Huneman offers a penetrating survey of the field. One of his first queries is, “to what extent did Kant really naturalize purpose?” Huneman understands the centrality in this question of Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction, urging aptly, “clarification of just what ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’ mean … [is] of the utmost concern for interpreting Kant’s critical philosophy.”64 Indeed, it illuminates “why the life sciences play a puzzling role in the architecture of science according to transcendental philosophy.”65 Similarly, Huneman raises the crucial question, “to what extent does [Kant’s] program fit the sciences of its time?”66 He establishes that the post-Kantian situation in the practice as well as in the philosophy of biology was far more complex, and the relation between Kant and his successors far more ambivalent, than the conventional view has maintained. That leads him to a final, crucial observation. “The time has come for a reappraisal of Naturphilosophie.” Indeed, “re-evaluating real Naturphilosophie [as opposed to a caricature of it] could lead to a critique of our analytical, reductionistic, anti-holistic conception of natural science.”67

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In “From the Critique of Judgment to the Hermeneutics of Nature,” Huneman recognizes that “Kantian philosophy and Naturphilosophie are usually conceived as antagonistic,” but he contends that there is nonetheless a continuity.68 In particular, Huneman wishes to establish that Naturphilosophie was “partially enabled by those results of the Critique of Judgment.”69 Through the third Critique, “Kant’s shifts within metaphysical concepts, and within the architecture of knowledge, allowed Schelling, Hegel, and most philosophers to develop a new kind of philosophical discourse about nature.”70 It also empowered practising life scientists, starting with Blumenbach, to pursue teleological thinking within their science without feeling “regrets.”71 In a second essay, “Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy to the ‘Adventure of Reason,’” Huneman reiterates the point that Kant’s specific commitment to the constitutive/regulative distinction was “lost in the development of the German philosophy and science, allowing scientists to refer indifferently to Kant and to Schelling.”72 He continues. “This implies that Naturphilosophie and scientists in a more Kantian tradition, like Blumenbach or later von Baer, were part of the same scientific cenacle.”73 This is the position that Robert Richards and I have been advocating.74 Thus, Huneman infers, “contemporary scorn for Naturphilosophie … hides, if not a contemporary relevance of such a program, then at least the entanglement of such a program with the transformations that were the incentives of Modern Biology.”75 That, indeed, is my central concern. Huneman allows that Kant was not the only force in this epoch. “Herder’s philosophy of mind rather than Kant’s transcendental philosophy could account for the monistic philosophies of the German idealists and then for their philosophy of nature.”76 He takes it that I have proposed these influences as mutually exclusive, but that is not at all the case: they need to be taken interactively. If I have stressed the role of Herder, it is because the historiography of both orthodox Kantianism and the Modern Synthesis in biology has overemphasized Kant to the exclusion of other influences.77 Indeed, I agree with Huneman not only about the indispensability of Kant but even about the explicit identification with Kant by the key proponents of Naturphilosophie (often suppressing Herder’s role) – and here Schelling proved paramount.78 The irony, which Huneman recognizes, is that Kant wanted none of this affiliation.79 “It might appear that in the end Kant was quite alone in insisting on the sharp distinction between regulative and constitutive, and mainly for metaphysical reasons.”80 I could not agree more.

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In “Kant on the History of Nature: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Critical Philosophy for Natural History,” Phillip Sloan argues that Kant, by the time he composed the third Critique, questioned the “epistemic warrant for a science of historical developmentalism and transformism that claimed to be a true account of the history of nature.”81 What is important, in my view, is that Kant had earlier upheld the historicizing position, and, thus, it was exegetically legitimate for Kant’s readers to find in his work support for both sides of the argument. That Kant’s later position (although perhaps not his last – see the Opus postumum)82 took a restrictive epistemological stance on the possibilities of such scientific endeavours does not mean that his successors might not have had occasion to misunderstand it in terms of his earlier stance. Sloan takes up my argument that Kant’s characterization of this “daring adventure of reason” was a reassertion of his reservations against Herder and that he was certainly not endorsing the idea, even as he may have recognized its appeals. If some of Kant’s readers “read Kant through this Herderian lens, it was to misread him.”83 Indeed, Sloan argues that Goethe, foremost, undertook a strong misreading of the “daring adventure of reason” involved for Kant in any “archaeology of nature.”84 Of course, I agree. But it remains even for Sloan that these readers, “including Goethe, took from this ‘adventure of reason’ the warrant for drawing from Kant a program of developmental transcendental morphology and even a form of evolutionism.”85 I believe not only that they did so but also that they were reading Kant’s new position in light of his earlier contributions. More, I think this was a scientifically and philosophically fruitful misreading.86 Why was Kant’s view so swiftly overshadowed by Schelling? Frederick Gregory, no enthusiast for that development, identified three factors: “that in Kant nature seemed somehow less real than mind, that Kant’s scientific description of nature had to be restricted to mechanistic interaction alone, and the confusion that reigned about the status of scientific theory and the relation of science to religion.”87 Above all, what Kant refused to warrant was the overweening intuition of the epoch, that, in Gregory’s formulation, “Nature was not a timeless and immutable machine, but a temporal and developing organism.”88 Goethe gave expression to this when he tried to explain how he reacted to Linnaeus. “What he wanted to hold apart by force I had, according to the innermost need of my nature, to strive to bring together.”89 It was Herder, not Kant, who offered these thinkers the avenues towards synthesis – perilous as well as inspiring – that they pursued to shape the natural science of the epoch 1790–1820. It strikes me as decisive that major theorists of natural

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science in that era could hold Kant and Herder both in high esteem.90 Kant’s method and Herder’s manner were decisive conjointly in constituting the scientific imagination of the age.91 But I want to be even more aggressive here and contend that it is not at all clear that the philosophers or scientists of the era 1790–1820 could come to a clear determination of exactly what Kant’s philosophy of science was. It is not simply the charisma of Schelling or his intonation of living nature that made it possible for Naturphilosophie to so swiftly overshadow Kantianism.92 It is rather that Kantianism proved starkly polyvalent and to have a fortiori no coherent legacy. Kielmeyer put it well in his effort to distance himself from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in response to Cuvier’s query and tacit accusation: not only was Schelling doing something original, but he was responding to real problems in Kant’s own formulations.93 To be sure, Kant was invoked – ubiquitously.94 But there was nothing unequivocal about that invocation. Kant’s own publications contributed to the confusion. In 1800, the Jäsche Logic appeared, offering to a wider readership Kant’s general introduction to the field of philosophy as he had presented it to students at Königsberg University for a generation.95 But this text was an amalgam of pre-critical and critical formulations, not a guide to the critical philosophy in its finished form. Almost simultaneously, three new editions of Kant’s Universal Natural History (orig. 1755) appeared in 1797, 1798, and 1808, to say nothing of its inclusion in several collected editions of Kant’s work that were brought to market at the very end of the eighteenth century.96 The Universal Natural History was Kant’s boldest effort towards a history of nature (cosmogony), but it also contained his most imaginative speculations about life on other planets, and so on. Here “method” and “manner” were blurred in a way that certainly appears rather Herderian.97 This was hardly “critically” policed natural science, yet it was widely and enthusiastically received. Even the rigorously “critical” Kant seemed to point in a myriad of directions. Peter McLaughlin has made the very important point that the message of Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science was not the same as the message of the Critique of Judgment.98 It was the so-called dynamic physics of the former, although not its rigid stipulation for “authentic” science, that was most widely taken up by the natural scientists of the 1790s.99 As McLaughlin correctly notes, not only was the account of organism offered in the Critique of Judgment widely available elsewhere, hence rendering it a conveniently concise formulation of the conventional wisdom, but it also posed uncongenial objections to the enquiry

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into life forces that was the driving concern of physiological investigation in the era.100 Kant proved a bewilderment, not a panacea. That is why, as Dieter Henrich observed with harsh accuracy, Kantianism dissolved almost instantly into a host of “post-Kantianisms” over the decade of the 1790s.101 The “critical philosophy” was very hard to digest as a whole (as is no less the case today). For one thing, his very terminology was daunting, presenting, in Brigitte Lohff’s delicate phrasing, “difficulties for comprehension” (Verständnisschwierigkeiten) so substantial that lexica were required to render his technical terms accessible for ordinary readers.102 In fact, Lohff makes clear, “never was the complete philosophical system of doctrine assimilated.” Instead, only “philosophical slants [Tendenzen] and turns of phrase” were taken up.103 As Lohff very aptly observes, the philosophically troubled physiological community was not necessarily sophisticated in coming to terms with Kant’s system.104 For the era 1795–1820, those who theorized about medicine as a science had to wrestle with Kant’s “critical” characterization of the relationship between the empirical and the rational, between the a priori and the a posteriori, and his particular construal of the limits of human understanding concerning nature – including human nature – as they applied to medical knowledge. To be sure, Kant “was explicitly and frequently invoked in the physiological texts,” but it was not clear whether his point was that there could be no knowledge without experience or that the only authentic knowledge was a priori.105 Was the “critical” philosophy cautionary for the practical pursuit of medical knowledge, testing it against ideals of systematicity and certainty, or was the “critical” philosophy undermining, dismissing the very possibility of “scientific” medicine? What Lohff documents with painstaking thoroughness is the bewilderment of a generation of thinkers grappling with Kant’s wisdom. And that very ambiguity makes “post-Kantianism” historically far more plausible – including Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, which came to be taken up simultaneously with Kant’s philosophy, and often as the resolution of the quandaries in which the latter had left interpreters. “It is an old folly to believe that organization and life cannot be explained through natural principles. If that is as much as to say: the first origin of organic nature cannot be investigated physically, then this unproven claim accomplishes nothing more than to crush the ambition of the researcher,” Schelling observed in 1797.106 This was the decisive point that linked his program in Naturphilosophie to the ambitions of emergent life science. Schelling’s whole project of a “speculative physics” needs to

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be grasped in terms of this complex dialectic between theory and experiment, process and product, particularity and theoretical integration. He saw himself undertaking a philosophical rescue operation for a natural science in epistemological crisis, on the one hand, and on the cusp of theoretical breakthroughs, on the other. LeeAnn Hansen captures this sense by evoking one of Schelling’s earliest and strongest adherents, Henrich Steffens. “As Steffens saw it at the time, Kant had made a philosophy of nature impossible. Schelling had saved the day.”107

Concluding Remarks My admiration for Reill is sustained and emphatic, but I find that this significant interpretive difference between us has widespread implications requiring an explicit contestation. His work has been very influential in isolating and discrediting Naturphilosophie in relation to his ideas of Enlightenment vitalism. This is very clear in a recent anthology, Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, in which his views inform the writings of the volume editor and several other contributors.108 His contribution sets out a very candid acknowledgment of his motivation: he wishes to save the Enlightenment from the postmodernist critiques to which it has recently been subjected by deflecting that criticism to the Naturphilosophen.109 While I agree with him that the postmodernist conception of the Enlightenment is rank caricature, I do not find it historically plausible or conceptually sensible to offer them an alternative scapegoat.110 What is bad history vis-à-vis the Enlightenment is, simply, equally bad history directed at Romantic Naturphilosophie. Indeed, Romantic Naturphilosophie has been disparaged for more than a century already by positivism, and it strikes me as telltale that postmodernism and positivism might find common cause here, as they have in so many other important ways that already arouse suspicion.

NOTES 1 See, e.g., R. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). For an important revision in the interpretation of these developments, see the pointed criticisms of Schofield in P.M. Heimann and J.E. McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in 18thCentury Thought,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 8 (1971), 233–306, esp. 234–5 and passim.

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2 For an overview, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31; and Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, General Scholium, final paragraph. 4 H. Guerlac, “Newton’s Changing Reputation in the Eighteenth Century,” in Carl Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited, ed. R. Rockwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 3–26; A.R. Hall and M.B. Hall, “Newton’s Electric Spirit: Four Oddities,” Isis 50 (1959, 473–6; I.B. Cohen and A. Koyré, “Newton’s Electric and Elastic Spirit,” Isis 51 (1960), 337; J.E. McGuire, “Force, Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” Ambix 15 (1968): 187–208; McGuire, “Transmutation and Immutability: Newton’s Doctrine of Physical Qualities,” Ambix 14 (1967): 69–95; McGuire, “The Origins of Newton’s Doctrine of Essential Qualities,” Centaurus 12, no. 9 (1968): 233–60; and McGuire, “Atoms and the ‘Analogy of Nature’: Newton’s Third Rule of Philosophizing,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 1 (1970): 3–58. 5 Max Jammer, Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 158–87; and M.B. Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), 157–88. 6 “Whilst the extensionalist mathematical Newtonian approach offers the potential for (mathematical) a priori processing of physical nature, the price which this pays is that since forces do not have in this scheme any basic or ‘essential’ place, they have (because of the conceptual doubt attaching to them) to be introduced ad hoc (from ‘without’), by way of hypothesis only. The objection to this, of course, … is that such a basic and powerful notion as force (let alone the force of attraction) ought not to be surrounded with the suspicion which – particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – surrounded anything ‘hypothetical’ in science”; see Gerd Buchdahl, “Kant’s ‘special metaphysics’ and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Physical Science, ed. R.E. Butts (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 150–1. 7 Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, 95. 8 Ibid., 68. 9 Ibid., 99. Schofield found in his scientists a shift from logical, mathematical, abstract rationalism towards a more complex qualitative and metaphysical orientation. He associated the more abstract and mechanistic approach of the earlier generation with “Augustan rationality” and with deism, lamenting that, in the new generation, “that peculiar combination of classics, logic and mathematics which had tempered the mind to

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John Zammito abstract studies was missing.” The parallels between these two positions were worked out long ago by A.O. Lovejoy, “The Parallels of Deism and Classicism,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). Schofield did admit this at one point, in Mechanism and Materialism, 94. See Peter Hanns Reill’s essays: “Science and the Science of History in the Spätaufklärung,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. H.E. Boedeker, George Iggers, Jonathan Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); “Bildung, Urtyp and Polarity: Goethe and EighteenthCentury Physiology,” Goethe Yearbook 3 (1986): 139–48; “Anti-Mechanism, Vitalism and Their Political Implications in Late Enlightened Scientific Thought,” Francia 16, no. 2 (1989): 195–212; “Buffon and Historical Thought in Germany and Great Britain,” in Buffon 88: Actes du Colloque international pour le bicentenaire de la mort de Buffon, ed. Jean Gayon et al. (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 667–79; “Die Historisierung von Natur und Mensch: Der Zusammenhang von Naturwissenschaften und historischem Denken im Entstehungsprozeß der modernen Naturwissenschaften,” in Geschichtsdiskurs, Bd. 2: Anfänge modernen historischen Denkens (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 48–61); “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994): 345–66; “Anthropology, Nature and History in the Late Enlightenment: The Case of Friedrich Schiller,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 243–65; and “Analogy, Comparison, and Active Living Forces: Late Enlightenment Responses to the Skeptical Critique of Causal Analysis,” in Johann van der Zande and Richard Popkin, ed., The Skeptical Tradition around 1800 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 203–11. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 9–16. Peter Hanns Reill, “Between Mechanism and Hermeticism: Nature and Science in the Late Enlightenment,” in Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Frühe Neuzeit – Frühe Moderne? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 393–421, citing 401. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 402. Ibid., 405–6. Ibid., 416. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 79, 104. Ibid., 69–70.

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20 Reill, Vitalizing Nature, esp. ch. 5, “From Enlightenment Vitalism to Romantic Naturphilosophie,” 199–236. 21 For the substantial revival of interest in and appreciation for Naturphilosophie and the science of the Romantic epoch, see Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Karen Gloy and Paul Burger, eds., Die Naturphilosophie im Deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993); Stefano Poggi and Maurizio Bossi, eds., Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994); Frederick Amrine, Francis Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, eds., Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987); and Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky, eds., Hegel and the Sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984). 22 Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 507. For such older, negative interpretations, see, e.g., Jane Oppenheimer, Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). For their survival in substantial measure, see Frederick Gregory, “Kant’s Influence on Natural Scientists in the German Romantic Period,” in New Trends in the History of Science, ed. R.P.W. Visser, H.J.M. Bos, L.C. Palm, and H.A.M. Snelders (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 53–72; Gregory, “Romantic Kantianism and the End of the Newtonian Dream in Chemistry,” Archives internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 34, no. 112 (1984): 108–23; and Gregory, “Kant, Schelling, and the Administration of Science in the Romantic Era,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 5, no. 1 (1989): 17–35. Timothy Lenoir, too, finds Naturphilosophie (at least in Schelling’s form) repugnant; see Lenoir, “Generational Factors in the Origin of Romantische Naturphilosophie,” Journal of the History of Biology 11, no. 1 (1978): 57–100. LeeAnn Hansen Le Roy has offered a very telling characterization: “Naturphilosophie has long been a skeleton in the closet for the history of science”; see LeeAnn Hansen Le Roy, Johann Christian Reil and Naturphilosophie in Physiology (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1985), 1. And yet even she cannot avoid the patronizing query, “Why did a system so manifestly crazy appeal to a number of people?” (ibid., 101). What if it was not? 23 Beiser, German Idealism, 507. 24 Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3. And “The Romantic movement, to be sure, has been dismissed as a source of genuine scientific accomplishment during the period” (ibid., 512). 25 Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 14.

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John Zammito Ibid., 252–3. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 201. Kant, Critique of Judgment (Berlin: Prussian Academy Edition, cited as AA:vol:page: here: AA:5:419n.). Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 201. Ibid. See John Zammito, “Should Kant Have Abandoned the ‘Daring Adventure of Reason’? The Interest of Contemporary Naturalism in the Historicization of Nature in Kant and Idealist Naturphilosophie,” in International Yearbook of German Idealism, vol. 8 (2010; actually 2012), 130–64. I borrow the phrase from W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956), 167–98. Daniel Steuer, “Goethe’s Natural Investigations and Scientific Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160–78, citing 175. See John Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 214. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 229–32. Even Oken deserves a more complex reading. See the collaboration by Olaf Breidbach and Michael Ghiselin, “Lorenz Oken and Naturphilosophie in Jena, Paris, and London,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24, no. 2 (2002): 219–47. For a more complex consideration, see Thomas Bach, Biologie und Philosophie bei C.F. Kielmeyer und F.W J. Schelling (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2001); and Wolfgang Pross, “Herders Konzept der organischen Kräfte und die Wirkung der ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’ auf Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer,” in Philosophie des Organischen in der Goethezeit: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung des Naturforschers Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844), ed. Kai Torsten Kanz (Stuttgart, 1994), 81–99. He has not been alone in this tactic. See Dietrich von Engelhardt, “Quellen und Zeugnisse zur Wechselwirkung zwischen Goethe und den romantischen Naturforschern,” Acta historica Leopoldina 20 (1992): 31–55. Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen einer Geographie der Pflanzen (1807), cited in Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 134n. Kant, Critique of Judgment, AA:5:419n.

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44 Ibid., 377. As Beiser phrases it, “Is it possible to give the idea of life a constitutive worth, so that we can assume that nature is an organism? Or is it necessary to assign it a merely regulative status, so that we can investigate nature only as if it were an organism?” (German Idealism, 519). 45 See John Zammito, “‘Method’ vs ‘Manner’? Kant’s Critique of Herder’s Ideen in Light of the Epoch of Science, 1790–1820,” Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 1–25. 46 Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 229. 47 Ibid., 11. 48 Ibid., 490. 49 Ibid., 9. Richards maintains that “both Schelling and Goethe were biological evolutionists and … their conceptions straightened the path for German zoologists to advance more quickly and easily to Lamarckian and Darwinian theories than could their counterparts in England and France” (ibid., 211). Indeed, Richards believes that through the mediation of Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin himself was steeped in the Romantic conception of life (ibid., 551). That is why Richards ends his work with an “Epilogue” on Darwin as Romantic biologist (ibid., 514–54). 50 Beiser, German Idealism, 556. 51 Ibid., 559. 52 Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 133, 184. 53 Ibid., 550. 54 Ibid., 530. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 367. 57 Ibid. Thus, “Schelling, like Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel, is less a strict Spinozist than a follower of Herder’s vitalist reinterpretation of Spinoza” (ibid., 530). 58 Beiser, German Idealism, 466. 59 Ibid., 530. 60 Ibid., 557. 61 Ibid., 466. 62 Ibid., 484. 63 Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 329. 64 Philippe Huneman, introduction to Understanding Purpose: Collected Essays on Kant and Philosophy of Biology, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 1–36, citing 1. 65 Ibid., 5. 66 Ibid., 2. 67 Ibid., 17–18.

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68 Philippe Huneman, “From the Critique of Judgment to the Hermeneutics of Nature,” Continental Philosophy Review 39, no. 1 (2006): 1–34, citing 8. 69 Ibid., 2. 70 Ibid. 71 On the term “regrets” in this context, see Kenneth Caneva, “Teleology with Regrets,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 291–300; and Timothy Lenoir, “Teleology without Regrets: The Transformation of Physiology in Germany: 1790–1847,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 12, no. 4 (1981): 293–354. 72 Philippe Huneman, “Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy to the ‘Adventure of Reason,’” Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37, no. 4 (2006): 649–74, citing 657. 73 Huneman, “From the Critique of Judgment,” 8. 74 Robert J. Richards, “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences 31, no. 1 (2000): 11–32; and John Zammito, “‘This Inscrutable Principle of an Original Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant’s Philosophy of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 73–109. 75 Huneman, “From the Critique of Judgment,” 8. 76 Ibid. 77 See John Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 78 Schelling was eager to affiliate himself with Kant and hesitant to acknowledge the influence of Herder. This has constituted a very important hermeneutic problem in the reconstruction of his intellectual development. The crucial intermediary for the clarification of the relations is Kielmeyer. 79 Huneman, “From the Critique of Judgment,” 9. 80 Ibid., 8. 81 Phillip Sloan, “Kant on the History of Nature: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Critical Philosophy for Natural History,” Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006): 627–48, citing 628. 82 See Catherine Wilson, “Kant and the Speculative Sciences of Origins,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 375–401. 83 Sloan, “Kant on the History of Nature,” 643. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Zammito, “Should Kant Have Abandoned the ‘Daring Adventure of Reason’? The Interest of Contemporary Naturalism in the Historicization

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of Nature in Kant and Idealist Naturphilosophie,” 130–64; and Zammito, “Organism: Objective Purposiveness,” in Kant: Key Concepts, ed. Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard (London: Acumen, 2010), 170–83. Gregory, “Kant’s Influence on Natural Scientists in the German Romantic Period,” 60. Ibid., 57. Goethe, cited in Jane Oppenheimer, Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology, 136. Owsei Temkin even goes so far as to contend that “Herder’s Ideen were the starting point for the whole biological movement around 1800 including not only Kielmeyer but also Goethe, Cuvier, and Pfaff”; see Temkin, “German Concepts of Ontogeny and History Around 1800,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 24 (1950): 227–46, citing 241n). He adds that Schelling made emphatic reference to Kielmeyer’s connection with Herder even as he celebrated the former for his “new epoch of natural history,” and that Hegel made similarly emphatic reference to Schelling’s own derivation of Naturphilosophie from Kielmeyer and Herder (ibid., 241 and n). William Coleman writes of the Kielmeyer-Herder connection as follows: “Kielmeyer spoke of geology and biology in the distinctive context of late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century German reflections on worldhistorical development.… Johann Gottfried von Herder … extended contemporary cosmogonies beyond attention to the first formation of the earth and planetary system to a wide-ranging concern for the preparation of the earth’s surface as a suitable abode for man.… His conjectures exerted a profound influence upon Kielmeyer’s developing views”; see Coleman, “Limits of Recapitulation Theory: Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s Critique of the Presumed Parallelism of Earth History, Ontogeny, and the Present Order of Organisms,” Isis 64 (1973): 341–350, citing 342. Zammito, “‘Method’ versus ‘Manner’?” For a subtle and effective problematizing of these matters, see Nicholas Jardine, “The Significance of Schelling’s ‘Epoch of a Wholly New Natural History’: An Essay on the Realization of Questions,” in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. R.S. Woodhouse (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 327–50. Kielmeyer to Cuvier, December 1807, in Kielmeyer: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. F.H. Holler (Berlin: Kepier, 1938), 251. Brigitte Lohff, Die Suche nach der Wissenschaftlichkeit der Physiologie in der Zeit der Romantik (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990), 42, 44. See also Dwight Barnaby, “The Early Reception of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,” in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth

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John Zammito and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. R.S. Woodhouse, 281–306; L. Pearce Williams, “Kant, Naturphilosophie and Scientific Method,” in Foundations of Scientific Method: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Ronald Giere and Richard Westfall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 3–22. The Jäsche Logic has been translated into English as Kant, Logic (New York: Dover, 1974). Stanley L. Jaki, introduction to Immanuel Kant: Universal Natural History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), cited in Trevor DeJager, G.R. Treviranus (1776–1837) and the Biology of a World in Transition (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1991), 84. It is no surprise that this was Herder’s favourite work by Kant. Peter McLaughlin, “Kants Organismusbegriff in der Kritik der Urteilskraft,” in Kanz, ed., Philosophie des Organischen in der Goethezeit (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 100–10. Ibid., 100–7. Ibid., 109. Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991). Lohff, Die Suche nach der Wissenschaftlichkeit, 42. Ibid., 36. Similarly, Reinhard Mocek observes, “Reil and his medical colleagues of the time had by no means studied this philosophy in all its ramifications, that is in a sense developed themselves into philosophical competitors.” Instead they oriented themselves to a few lines of thought and emphases, “categories, high-profile definitions, fundamental determinations”; see Mocek, Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813): Das Problem des Übergangs von der Spätaufklärung zur Romantik in Biologie und Medizin in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 101. Lohff, Die Suche nach der Wissenschaftlichkeit, 42, 44. Friedrich Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, 2:348, cited in Heuser-Kessler, “Schellings Organismusbegriff und seine Kritik des Mechanismus und Vitalismus,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 14 (1989): 17–36, citing 31. Hansen Le Roy, Johann Christian Reil, 101. Susanne Lettow, ed., Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). Reill, “The Scientific Construction of Gender and Generation in the German Late Enlightenment and in German Romantic Naturphilosophie,” in ibid., 65–82. See his anthology with Keith Baker, What’s Left of Enlightenment: A Postmodern Question (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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110 See John Zammito, “Rival Enlightenments, Counter-Enlightenments and Anti-Enlightenments: The Status of a Period Concept in 21st Century Historiography,” in The Fate of Reason: Contemporary Understanding of Enlightenment, ed. Hans Feger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 299–304.

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PART TWO VITALISM IN POLITICAL AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION

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chapter four

“That Infinite Variety of Human Forms”: Modern Identity and Portraiture in Enlightenment England FRÉDÉRIC OGÉE

In this essay, I would like to focus on the consequences of the new epistemology that emerged in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, on the manner in which it modified the British view of human life, and, as a consequence, the way it was now represented in art and literature. In relation to Peter Reill’s ground-breaking central argument in Vitalizing Nature (2005), I will try to examine the manner in which the new conception of Nature, and of the knowledge of nature, which was so frequently discussed in the early Enlightenment, came to influence the English conception of self, identity, and the various “forms” of human life and, in turn, how it endowed with a completely new agenda the artistic and literary renderings or representations of life forms – namely, portraiture and the biographical novel. After making a certain number of general considerations regarding the new intellectual climate that presided over the much publicized emergence of the English portrait and the English novel, I will then concentrate on two exemplary creators, William Hogarth and Laurence Sterne, who were probably the most prominent self-conscious designers of their age in their representations of life forms and in their investigation of the issues at stake. Even though it could have constituted a good starting point, I will not pursue here what I have written elsewhere about the striking methodological links between the visual practice of Royal Society experimenters and their use of images – I am thinking in particular of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia – and Hogarth’s pictorial enterprise – particularly his use of “plural,” synthetic images, of sequential patterns and series of images – to capture and represent the movement of life in a still medium.1

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My inspiring spark will be Michel Baridon’s remarkable essay on Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty and the way his new aesthetics were theorized from his very perceptive response and sensibility to the contemporary scientific evolutions regarding the movements of the nerves, the muscles, and the circulation of the blood under the skin, which combined together to evidence sensorially the presence of life. The world as Hogarth sees it is the world described by the life sciences; it has warmth, it has elasticity and it has “juices” on which the colour of the skin depends.… The attention given to the visual manifestations of life is the distinctive mark of Hogarth’s artistic theory. While discussing his principles, he made great use of the concept of motion, showing how objects move or how the eye moves while looking at them. But the great difference between his views on motion and those of his predecessors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that he divorced motion from the mechanical philosophy with which it had hitherto been associated.… By calling attention to “fitness” and by making it an aesthetic criterion, he certainly perceived the internal logic of the development of the life sciences as they existed in his own time.… Albeit in an intuitive way, and probably because he had no sympathy for apologetic optimism under all its forms, he appears to have been closer to real science than some of the physico-theologians of his time.2

One of the great originalities of eighteenth-century England could be said to be the invention and exploration of the first person, in a dynamic, empirical sense, resulting from a discovery and an exploration (Tristram’s first words are “I wish …”). Indeed, the combined pressures of parliamentary monarchy, a market economy, and the new experimental science put social hierarchies and rank under real stress and rapidly shook the notion of immutable, predetermined, or predefined identity, which now increasingly became a matter of individual experience and “progress,” developing over time. The acknowledgment of the complexity, variety, and specificity of each individual human being became the central issue in all branches of knowledge, from physiology to aesthetics, from travel expeditions to fashion. It was also the topic of most, if not all, of the “modern” novels. Indeed, the various experiments in prose fiction that, from Addison and Defoe to Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, brought literature down into the public arena and shaped popular narratives into a sophisticated and remarkably efficient genre – the novel – those literary experiments can undeniably be seen as the direct consequence, in literature, of the

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new philosophical and scientific prescriptions for a more direct observation of nature – in this case, human nature. Moving away from the rarefied, idealized representation of man that “high” literature had until then offered, a new generation of writers, taking advantage of the formidable development and freedom of the printing press, developed a new form of literary expression based on the precise observation of contemporary nature “there and then.” Each of these novels, as indicated by their titles (Moll Flanders, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, etc.), offers the narrative of a simple, “modern” individual undergoing a series of adventures, of test tube experiments, and making his or her own progress through life and contemporary English society. Tom Jones, for example, is a foundling, a “blank page,” who needs to go through eighteen volumes and 350 thousand words before he can reach and wed “wisdom,” Sophia. Besides, the dissemination of an empirical theory of knowledge, presented and put forward as the expression of a “modern” and authentically British form of thinking, accompanied this evolution by explaining how individual existence was crucially linked to experience and duration, the individual being no longer conceived as a stable moral and social fact, but as the result of a progress and a series of exchanges. The Cartesian cogito was replaced by a new proposal: “I experience myself in time, therefore I am.” This conception of human existence as the experience of duration also played a decisive role in the emergence of English painting, whose practitioners were thus entitled to give new meaning to the highest academic genre, history painting. Now understood in a dynamic, empirical way, “modern history painting” became a genre that would tell stories or, rather, to use the term as scientists understood it, “histories.”3 Hogarth’s most famous artistic gesture, the adoption of a sequential form of representation, perfectly encapsulated this evolution. His numerous series, whether obviously narrative (A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode, Industry and Idleness) or more circular (The Four Stages of Cruelty, The Four Times of Day, the Election pictures), all express the new, dynamic, experiential conception of portraiture and representation. Presented directly in two of his most remarkable images, Characters and Caricaturas (Figure 4.1) and Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants (ca. 1750–5), the variety of human individualities is constantly explored in his work in all its social and visual consequences, from exhilarating energy to downright chaos. What Hogarth paid attention to was the way such individual progress could combine or collide, and for this he used (and

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Figure 4.1 William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas (1743).

shook up) the fashionable concept of conversation. Whether in clubs, coffee houses, or various functions at home, the art of conversation, praised by periodicals as the modern form of desirable social behaviour, was described as the best way to channel differences and diversities into “polite” harmony.4 Classical aristocratic portraiture, in Van Dyck, for instance, imposed its models as ideal, or idealized, presences, the details of whose individual existence were left out in favour of an abstract, atemporal representation.

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But since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the elitist artistic ideology on which such portraiture rested had been eaten up by the profound social evolutions caused by the increasing hegemony of banking and commerce and by all of the “progress” that the dizzying circulation of wealth allowed. Inspired by trade, conversation, which defined identity in terms of exchange and interrelations, became an “epistemological metaphor” for the age,5 when a certain number of private individuals began to meet more publicly (in coffee houses, clubs, and theatres) in order to become aware of themselves, exchange ideas and values, and gradually constitute these as public opinion, if not dominant ideology, soon installing the “conversation piece” as the fashionable English genre. With such an aestheticization of social relations and such attention paid to the image that society wished to give of itself, conversational portraiture became emblematic of “modern” behaviour. The basic idea was that the social interaction of individuals allowed each of them to control and refine their passions and desires by rubbing and polishing them within the group. They could thus reach that equilibrium, that “happy medium,” that writers and artists of the period all sought to figure out and that, in effect, was the ideological designation of a social space, the public sphere of the “middle class,” whose territory was to keep expanding by pushing the aristocracy and “the vulgar” increasingly to the side. Thus, conversation painting, which became extremely fashionable in the 1720s and 1730s, appears as the visual evidence of this search for the perfect balance, as the representation of the refinement of passions allowed by social commerce. It also makes the movements of life the main subject of the picture, thus endowing the genre with modern epistemological relevance. Wishing to account for the bubbling, changing, and therefore complex reality in all domains of eighteenth-century England, “modern” artists like Hogarth had to deal with the tension, if not the contradiction, between their urge to describe empirically the new effervescent multiplicity and the necessity to “compose” that variety. The concept of “unity of action” is generally defined as the elimination of the superfluous, the secondary, or what might be perceived as such. Hogarth’s polycentric scenes – their “composed variety” – offer an alternative to this since, far from abandoning the idea of such a unity, their compositions rely on effects of simultaneity and plural occupation of space, which permanently ensure a perceptive dynamic that is surreptitiously substituted for the former understanding of action as subject.6 It is the action of perception that becomes fundamental in that it alone will provide the work with

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Figure 4.2 William Hogarth, Southwark Fair (1733).

some form of unity. By experimenting with, and performing, a series of perceptive moves suggested by the works’ various centres, the beholder will experience the work and the forms of life it depicts. Most of Hogarth’s pictures are designed as so many contiguities of signifying units, as in Southwark Fair (Figure 4.2), which compose themselves and combine under the private eye of each individual spectator and only then give sense (direction and significance) and “life” to their perception. Beauty, as Hogarth defined it, was intrinsically linked to the movement and interaction of life, both in the pictures themselves and between pictures and beholders. The emphasis on the activity of perception, on the pleasure derived from an active, empirical perception of images, was given even stronger expression with Hogarth’s adoption of a serial form of representation. One of the most striking aspects of his oeuvre is the number of works he designed as sequences of images, in which the polycentric

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stage is, as it were, opened up and spread out over several successive pictures. The functioning principle of the series is pedagogically demonstrated in the rather crude but cleverly enticing pair of images entitled Before and After (Figure 4.3). The visual and moral effect comes as a result of the confrontation of those two images,7 while the humour comes from the suspense and the withholding of information. The title of the first picture is clearly programmatic. It opens a space of expectation and invites a temporal, left-to-right reading, while that of the second picture abruptly ends the “sentence” on a note of frustration. Meanwhile, the suspended fall of the vanity, or dressing table, in the first picture, a metaphorical anticipation of that of the young woman, underlines the artificial interruption of the passing of time, just as its subsequent fall in the second picture allows the beholder to discover, indicated by the risen ray of sunshine, a second image of Cupid, now cheekily laughing at the success of his “shot.” Down below, the “story” of the dog, erect then recoiled, is a rather obscene transposition of the successive movements of the man’s “animal parts.” One soon also becomes aware, of course, of the absence of a central image, an empty space that the beholder’s imagination is invited to fill. Hogarth, in his definition of the “line of beauty,” wrote that “by its twisting so many different ways, [it] may be said to in close (tho’ but a single line) varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be express’d on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination.”8 The two tenses of the narrative (before and after) create a tension, which, a little like dissonance in music, calls for a resolution. It is the same dynamic principle that informs the structure and perception of Hogarth’s more elaborate series. Thus, the gap between plates 1 and 2 of A Harlot’s Progress implies a tragic corruption of the young country girl, one that is left entirely to the beholder’s imagining. Similarly, in Marriage A-la-Mode, the first image, The Marriage Settlement (Figure 4.4), triggers a whole series of “after-effects” throughout the rest of the series. Hogarth’s novelty was to introduce more variety and complexity into this basic structure by examining the successive bounces of the pebbles of destiny. A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode, and Industry and Idleness are narratives of Newtonian causes and effects: before, and after, and after, and after, etc.

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Figure 4.3 William Hogarth, Before and After (1736).

In all aspects of his art, Hogarth gives pride of place to the operation of perception, and he invites beholders to play an active part in the realization of the work and to devise their own course within it. In The Analysis of Beauty, the serpentine line of beauty, which serves as the emblem of his theory, perfectly encapsulates his idea that aesthetic pleasure results from the

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Figure 4.3 (Continued)

dynamic variety of the beholder’s perceptive pursuits, and the moving – in both meanings of the term – proximity of those pursuits with the progress of the life described by the pictures. Hogarth thus boldly asserts that modernity in art results primarily from the diverse ways in which the beholder’s imagination will contribute to the work of art and the life of forms.

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Figure 4.4 William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, Plate 1: The Marriage Settlement (1743–5).

Laurence Sterne’s creation can certainly be approached from the same perspective, and it is no wonder, therefore, that he should have been so adamant to convince Hogarth that he should design engravings to illustrate his novel. As I hinted above, the contemporary rise of the novel was the consequence in literature of the exploration by authors of those same modern questions. All of their fictions, however different in tone, endeavour to explore the life progress of individuals, to offer the histories of particular experiments. Sterne’s take on the program, rich with the remarkable models offered by his immediate predecessors in the genre, gave both the most brilliant example and the most radical refutation of the powers of fiction in this respect. Like all of his predecessors, Sterne, with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), chose a storyline meant to describe

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how complex it is for any individual to integrate into a social system, how difficult it is to know of the life and opinions of anyone, when human conversation is shown to be mostly the frenzied collage of discourses that, like hobbyhorses, remain inaudible to each other. Yet Sterne’s generous religion was not that of Swift: his proposal, however reminiscent of Sisyphus, contains some suggestion of philosophical progress, which expresses an overarching belief in the precious value of individual liberty and human life. Tristram Shandy clearly presents itself as a modern, “progressive” portrait, structured along two narrative movements that run in opposite directions. One is that of rationalism, which purports to find out the causes and effects of an individual’s life and opinions, extracting from the details of the most particularized example a body of truths that acquire a universal dimension. True to the Enlightenment project to which it is contributing, the book shows simultaneously how exhilarating and how difficult it is to explore the functioning of the mind in its relation to the body. The other movement, which runs in the other direction, from the general to the particular, is that of subjectivity. In order to illustrate and problematize the infinite complexities of the individual mind (as they have been abundantly discussed ever since pen was put to paper) the book narrows down the focus to the particulars of life in a parlour on the ground floor of a Yorkshire cottage. The fireplace in that parlour is the test tube where the identities of the various members of the Shandy household are carefully warmed up, shaken, and deconstructed, with a view to underlining the fact that identity is no longer a fixed reality but rather a process. The life of the mind and body are shown to be made of flux, circulation, and association of ideas, and problems occur whenever this flux is interrupted or blocked. The first scene of the novel, during which Walter Shandy’s flow of animal spirits is interrupted by Mrs Shandy’s “silly” question about the winding of the clock is indeed, in all senses of the word, a seminal scene. As Tristram explains in volume 7 during his journey to France (volume 7 is a vibrant hymn to movement), “So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy – to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.”9 At a time when modern medicine, mostly concerned with the development of the life sciences (biology, neurology, physiology), had begun to equate good health with good circulation, Sterne’s representation of “the life and opinions” of Tristram Shandy is primarily concerned with the preservation of that movement, which is visualized in the graphs (Figure 4.5) used by Tristram to illustrate his progression through each volume, and which, as with Hogarth, is the emblem of life. “True Shandeism,” Tristram explains, “think what you

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Figure 4.5 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), vol. 6, chap. 40.

will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through its channels, makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.”10 Now, like the artist, the writer’s greatest challenge is to convey that sense of movement in a medium that tends to freeze it, to find ways of allowing for the complexities of understanding to appear in the text, on the page, to convey meaning while not fixing it, and to leave scope for the reader’s imagination. Life is made up of complex, contradictory movements, and the purpose of a biography (“The Life and Opinions…”) is to manage to capture and represent that complexity. The book therefore tries to take the “appearance” of life, and Sterne’s technical solutions are well known: absence of final closure, open stories, visual extensions and props (dashes; asterisks; little hands; black, white, and marbled pages), and the constant recourse to digression.

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Very much like Hogarth, Sterne keeps suggesting that truth, or meaning, or knowledge is a transient impression experienced in the gaps left between the lines by the text’s open spaces, which encourage the movement of the reader’s perception. “Attitudes are nothing, madam, – ’tis the transition from one attitude to another – like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all.”11 In the confrontation between the demands of rationalism and the workings of subjectivity, the reader is invited to steer a serpentine course. Sterne’s critique of rationalism is conducted through the character of Walter Shandy, who shows the extent to which a rational construction of identity tends to lead to the edification of systems and the writing of texts whose main drawback is their entomological pinning down of the butterflies of life. The story of Uncle Toby’s amours, which soon becomes the main topic of the book, is there to illustrate the fact that to explain the world in terms of causes and effects is necessary but not sufficient, that life will never be accountable in terms of straight lines. At the same time that Burke was praising the obscure and the irrational, Sterne’s construction of identity restores the importance of ellipsis, of the unaccountable, primarily in the conflicting demands of the mind and the body. An intellectual grasp of the world (evidenced in Walter Shandy’s impressive library) accounts for only half of man’s reality and life. It is equally important to complement it by taking into account the body’s priorities – hence the pregnant importance given by the narrative to body parts, sexual drives, and the circulation of vital fluids. Sterne the Anglican clergyman is keen to consider man’s identity as a process of constant exchange between body and soul and to point out that the ignorance of either, by Puritans on one side or materialists on the other, leads inevitably to a distortion of truth. The conclusion of the book, if we risk suggesting that it may have one, is that the exploration of another person’s identity is both the most foolish project to nourish and the most worthy enterprise of man. Books, words, systems, including novels, will never manage to encapsulate the infinite twists and turns of a person’s progress, yet without books, without words, without systems, including novels, our progress would be utterly impossible. The project of Tristram Shandy is perhaps to explain how we can grow, how we can progress from “homunculus” to “humanity,” the first and the last words in the text which appear in capital letters. For my own conclusion, I would like to focus on the character of Yorick, who features prominently in Sterne’s life – as the author of his sermons, as a character in Tristram Shandy, and as the narrator of Sterne’s

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subsequent and final book, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Yorick offers an ongoing autobiographical meditation on the living power of art over the transient life of man, and he will help me reintroduce the comparison with the visual arts with which I started. A close friend of Joshua Reynolds’s and an amateur painter himself, Sterne conceived his last book as a succession of vignettes, and their painterly texture is remarkable. The “short hand” that Yorick would like to become master of, in order to render “the several turns of looks and limbs,”12 is obviously an attempt to palliate the deficiencies, the “mere pomp”13 of words, with which Sterne had struggled in the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy. His last book teems with visual indications and carefully staged tableaux, or “painted scene[s] of life,”14 as well as with reflections on colouring and lines (e.g., the “sombre pencil” discussion in the Bastille chapter).15 The sentimentalism at stake in A Sentimental Journey is nothing but the sensorial medium looking for the proper tuning, the shedding of worldly, domestic (as opposed to foreign) preconceptions of what matters, with a view to allowing the traveller a sharper perception of the fall of a hair, the breath of a sigh, the curve of a limb, the blushing of a cheek, the fragment of a story on a piece of waste paper, etc. In Tristram Shandy, Parson Yorick is made to die in Volume 1, the victim of human malignity, and this momentous, deeply sentimental event is famously concluded by the black page. Yet it is clear that while Yorick’s life has thus been proleptically terminated, the book’s own existence transcends this tragic death, allowing the character to reappear later on in the story and transforming the black page into first a marbled and then a white page, open for the reader’s personal rendering of Widow Wadman’s charming figure. “Ars longa, vita brevis” – “life is short,” observes Walter Shandy, but the phrase that opens the expression suggests that artist and poet are endowed with the remarkable faculty of keeping life going beyond the black page, of constructing identity in ways that offer the possibility for biological and intellectual life to be transcended by the represented experience of humanity.

NOTES 1 Frédéric Ogée, “La représentation des formes du vivant dans l’oeuvre de William Hogarth,” Esthétique et mouvement scientifique, Dix-Huitième Siècle 31 (1999): 249–68.

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2 Michel Baridon, “Hogarth’s ‘Living Machines of Nature’ and the Theorisation of Aesthetics,” in William Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, ed. David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 85–101. 3 Locke called for a “history of particulars,” while Newton described his own enterprise as a “history of causes and effects.” 4 “Defined as a forum in which individuals learned to refine their behaviour in response to the needs of others, and to create a community based on sympathy and mutual understanding, conversation provided eighteenthcentury commercial ideologies with the perfect vehicle for constructing an idealised representation of the social relations that existed at the heart of the marketplace”; see David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 26. 5 The term is Umberto Eco’s. 6 On the polycentrism in Hogarth’s art, see Frédéric Ogée, introduction to The Dumb Show: Image and Society in the Works of William Hogarth – A Collection of Essays, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 1–26. 7 “In Hogarth’s excellent works, you see the delusive scene exposed with all the force of humour and, on casting your eyes on another picture, you behold the dreadful consequences” (Henry Fielding, The Champion, 10 June 1740). 8 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 1753, reprint, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 42. 9 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1967), VII:13, 471. 10 Ibid., IV:32, 333. 11 Ibid., IV:6, 278. 12 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768; repr., Oxford: World’s Classics, 2003), 47. 13 Ibid., 98. 14 Ibid., 32. 15 Ibid., 59.

chapter five

Was Marat a Vitalist? KEITH MICHAEL BAKER

This essay draws on work for an intellectual biography of Jean-Paul Marat that I have underway. I confess outright that Marat is scarcely an attractive figure to me, and he represents a part of the French Revolution with which I least sympathize. At the same time, he offers a compelling intellectual challenge: how to make sense of his ideas, his actions, his immense influence, and his still iconic status. Despite many claims to the contrary, he was neither a monster nor a madman; even if he were, saying so would not go very far in explaining his ideas or his actions. There are many different ways to be monstrous or mad; the question for the historian is to understand which were taken, why, and with what effect. I focus here on Marat’s earliest publications, An Essay on the Human Soul (1772) and A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773). The titles are not translated here: these works appeared anonymously in England, in English, before they were combined and enlarged for publication in a threevolume French edition as De l’homme (1775).1 Born in 1743, Marat left his native Neuchâtel in his late teens, possibly spending a year in Bordeaux before several in Paris. He moved to London in 1765 and seems to have practised medicine there for more than a decade. On the recommendation of two notable Edinburgh physicians, he received a medical degree from the University of St. Andrews in 1775, an award that has frequently evoked reference to Dr. Johnson’s famous quip that this was a university that got rich by degrees. A year later he moved to Paris, secured a court appointment as doctor to the bodyguard of the king’s brother, the comte d’Artois, and used that position to launch a fashionable medical practice. But his true ambition lay elsewhere. He spent another decade and all of his resources on experiments

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intended to reveal the true nature of fire and electricity and to refute Newton’s theory of optics. His discoveries were dismissed as factitious by the Paris Academy of Sciences, with the result that he lost, at the very last moment, the possibility of a Crown appointment as director of a new scientific academy in Madrid. Success, so close, slipped from his grasp in a fiasco he blamed (probably not without reason) on the Paris academicians. In 1789, he found a new career as a revolutionary journalist and eventual prophet of terror.2 To go back to these earliest of Marat’s publications, it seems likely that he crossed the English Channel in 1765 with some version of the first in his bag. The text of An Essay on the Human Soul offers ample evidence that it was composed in French and subsequently translated into English – by someone with less than perfect mastery of the language. “The desire to educate myself in the sciences and to escape the dangers of dissipation led me to move to England,” he told a later patron. “I became an author, and my first work was intended to combat materialism by showing the influence of the soul on the body and of the body on the soul.”3 Although it begins with the blustering claims to originality that would become a familiar feature of Marat’s scientific writings, it has to be said that this essay fails to yield any great novelty. Instead, it reads as an exercise in freshman philosophy, a young author’s effort to find some intellectual footing and assert some ideas as his own. Much of the book is taken up with a consideration of Rousseau’s Second Discourse. But the discussion of the relationship of the soul and the body is directed more specifically against Helvétius’s De l’esprit. “Some one has said, that the passions are only the voice of the body, and a philosopher of the present age has vainly tortured his understanding to explain it,” Marat writes in announcing a “Refutation of a Sophism of Helvetius.” He is willing to accept that many passions are prompted by physical sensations, but he is no less convinced that some derive only from the mind. And he cares most about one in particular. “Leave to the sophist author of De l’Esprit to deduce every passion from physical sensibility,” Marat charges his reader, “but he never will deduce therefrom the love of glory, that vain incense which ignorance and weakness offer to power, to valour, to genius, and of which great minds are so very avidious.”4 Why “vain” incense? Marat apparently means that mere fame is empty because the ignorant and weak are not in a position to judge true achievement. The future “ami du peuple” has little regard for the judgment of the common man. Great minds, he maintains, desire true, solid glory. For this reason, the greatest men of the past, “not content with the glory

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they possessed as monarchs, as heroes, aspire[d] to that of authors.” The splendour of thrones or the laurels of victory, they discovered, could owe much to mere circumstance, to the flattery of one’s supporters, or to the ignorance and cowardice of one’s enemies. This is why they “disdained a reputation they believed they had not deserved” and “aspired to that glory which is founded on personal merit, and sought it in science.”5 What a revealing choice, to make the search for the true glory of the intellect the touchstone of the immaterial soul! For the poor immigrant’s son from Switzerland, this search becomes, as it were, the defining principle of the self, his exalted version of the Cartesian cogito. “Is not the love of the Beautiful and Honourable, which forms in the heart of the wise an inexhaustible found [sic] of delicate sentiments, and enables him to possess, amidst the disorder and subversion of nature, that joy which no misfortune can remove?”6 If I seek true glory, Marat wants to suggest, I truly am. Attaining that glory, I reign with the greatest men in the empire of the mind. We begin to understand how profoundly invested Jean-Paul Marat is in intellectual success – and in celebrating ancient virtues. Marat believes in greatness of soul. Admiration for the ancients goes along with defence of the soul in his early repudiation of materialism. His own desire for glory leads the author of An Essay on the Human Soul into an extended effort to state his views regarding sensibility, memory, judgment, understanding, reason, and the passions – all master topics of eighteenth-century sensationist philosophy. His thoughts scarcely seem to cohere into a single argument, but they do tend to converge around two basic claims. One points to the weakness of reason in the face of the passions. A second insists on the union between the soul and the body. His next philosophical work was intended to explain the “laws of this union.”7 That work, A Philosophical Essay on Man, Being an Attempt to Investigate the Principles and Laws of the Reciprocal Influence of the Soul on the Body, appeared a year later in two volumes, with a third intended. No longer the effort of a freshman philosopher to decide his views, it drew on the evidence of anatomical investigation and physiological experimentation. Marat now presented himself as a master of the microscope, a doctor of the dissecting knife. He had joined that legion of mid-eighteenth-century thinkers convinced that physiology and medicine would open the avenue towards the true citadel of a “science of man.” Not that this medical practitioner and experimental anatomist declared himself satisfied with the state of his subject. “How many systems have been invented! How many volumes written upon this subject! And what

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a multitude of absurdities involve the few truths that have been published thereon!”8 A few anatomical and physiological discoveries aside, Marat saw only confusion, pompous inanity, and empty speculation in his subject. A sweeping footnote, breathtaking in its arrogance, invited the reader, “for proofs of this, [to] read the works of Hume, Voltaire, Bonnet, Racine, Pascal, &c.” One can only imagine how many others were indicted by that “et cetera!” To Marat, the result of all this philosophical babble was clear: “the science of Man,” that Holy Grail of eighteenthcentury philosophy, remained “entirely unknown.”9 Its secrets remained to be revealed, not by advancing any “vague and arbitrary hypothesis,” but by “attentive examination of the phenomena.”10 Empiricist bombast ran throughout this book, along with details of physiological experimentation and enough attention to the mechanism of sexual arousal to earn one reviewer’s condemnation. With dismissal of systems and declarations of epistemological modesty behind him, Marat stated emphatically the fundamental claim of A Philosophical Essay on Man (and the conventional eighteenth-century view). “Man, in common with all animals, is composed of two distinct parts, soul and body.”11 It was needless, he thought, to prove so established a truth; those who doubted it could simply stop reading. Nonetheless, the way to the soul was through the body. The soul, eluding the senses, could be detected only indirectly. It was necessary “to penetrate to the soul through the integuments of the body, and observe the influence of the material substance upon the spiritual, to be able to distinguish the properties peculiar to it, from such as are dependent on a foreign principle.”12 Marat aimed, in effect, to push physiological explanation to the limit, confident that there would be something left over to attribute to the soul. But this was a hazardous path. What if physiology left nothing more for the defender of the soul to explain? Was Marat putting the soul at risk even as he sought to demonstrate its existence? Diderot’s reading of his work is interesting in this respect. Annoyed by the categorical assertion of the distinction between soul and body when he read the French version of A Philosophical Essay on Man a few years later, Diderot almost accepted Marat’s invitation to stop reading. “I thought about closing the book. Eh! Ridiculous writer, if I once admit these two distinct substances, you have nothing more to teach me. You don’t know what it is that you call soul, even less how they are united, and not at all how they act reciprocally one upon another.”13 But Diderot didn’t close the book; instead, he pored over it in search of physiological evidence for his own materialistic philosophy. He found much that he could use.14

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The immortal and immaterial soul, Marat saw, was in danger of vanishing in the philosophy of his time. In his Philosophical Essay on Man, he aimed to locate it and secure the fact of its existence. To do so, he needed to address the central problem of mid-eighteenth-century physiology: the relationship of the nervous system to the functioning of bodily motion on the one hand and to the operations of the mind (or soul) on the other. Haller had posed the essential terms of this problem in 1753, when he published his key “Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals,” which reported the results of hundreds of animal experiments. Offering a radical conceptual clarification, he defined “irritability” as the propensity of bodily tissue to react when stimulated by a foreign body, distinguishing it from “sensibility,” the property that causes such stimulation to be accompanied by sensation in human beings or evident pain in animals. An amputated bodily part (or an eel cut into many pieces) will continue for a while to move or respond to stimulation. A muscle paralysed by tying or severing the related nerve can be made to move by poking it with a needle, without this producing any sensation in the animal concerned. Such results led Haller to regard irritability as a basic property of bodily tissue, responsible for most vital functions through involuntary, unconscious motion. Even more fundamentally, they allowed him to separate the ongoing mechanism of involuntary motion from the operation of the nervous system that communicated sensation to the brain and will to those parts of the body moved by voluntary action. Delimiting and restricting the operation of sensibility in this manner was Haller’s way of saving it from materialistic accounts. With this argument, he aimed to sustain a view of the soul as a spiritual entity that remained distinct from the body even as it received sensory information from the body via the nerves and the brain and, in turn, gave conscious direction to voluntary physical motion.15 Like any dualism, Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility invited subversion. By 1753, La Mettrie had already used the results of Haller’s earlier work to collapse sensibility into irritability, thus reducing the operations of the soul to the material functioning of the body. Haller could only insist in his “Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals” that his research had nothing in common with the “impious system” of L’Homme machine.16 But there were others ready to subvert Haller’s dualism from the other direction. One was the Scots anatomist Robert Whytt, to whom Peter Reill devotes some illuminating pages in his study of vitalism.17 Another, less well known in this respect, was the noted

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Rouen surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat. Both Whytt and Le Cat drew on an older current of animism, deriving from Stahl, that conceived of the soul as the vital principle operating throughout the body. Marat’s own views were developed, above all, in response to the arguments of Le Cat, whose many works culminated in a three volume Traité des sensations et des passions en général, et des sens en particulier (1767–8). Le Cat set the motion of the human body within a kind of spiritualized hydraulics of the universe. In his philosophy, the world and everything it contains is imprinted by God through the action of a first, most subtle, fluid, or “universal spirit.” Le Cat imagines this fluid as “Minister of the Supreme Being,” the agent through which the Almighty has brought order from chaos, giving life to the universe and, consequently, to all of the animals that are part of it. The solids and liquids of the human body, like those of other animals, are made of earthly materials of different degrees of density, but they all owe their operation to the infusion within them of subtler, invisible fluids penetrated in turn by the universal spirit that is the moving force of the universe.18 Given these vitalist convictions, it is not surprising that Le Cat was determined to counter Haller’s arguments and to restore the operation of the immaterial soul throughout the entire body. He could do so only by restating the primacy of the sensibility operating through the nervous system over the muscular motion that Haller derived solely from the operation of the material property of irritability. Motivated by the conviction that “the material principle is without energy unless it is animated by the true sensitive principle that is the soul,”19 Le Cat offered an extended repudiation of Haller’s physiology in his Traité de l’existance [sic], de la nature et des propriétés du fluide des nerfs, et principalement de son action dans le mouvement musculaire, published in 1765. Haller and his disciples, Le Cat contended, were falling into mechanistic explanations that turned human beings into automata. Against Haller, Le Cat insisted that the brain communicates with the muscles by means of a fluid circulating through the network of the nervous system. This fluid, “the instrument of our sensations,” is a kind of “ amphibious entity” composed of a material part (“a mucilaginous lymph”) and a more spiritual part (a “nuance supérieure”) that links it with the immaterial soul.20 This argument invited a critical objection: if there is no irritability without sensibility, then sensibility must still remain in severed bodily parts that continue to move or respond to stimulation. This would mean, in turn, that an animal has a sensitive soul, that this soul is still somehow

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present in its severed bodily parts, and that the soul itself is therefore divisible indefinitely. Le Cat responded to this reasoning by allowing that since animals experience sensations, they must indeed have a true immaterial soul (although not, he hastened to add, an immortal one). But he disallowed the further conclusion that the soul is indefinitely divisible. An immaterial substance occupies no place, he argued; it cannot therefore be said to occupy several places at the same time. The material fluid through which the soul acts can indeed be divided, but “the immaterial substance, the true soul,” cannot. While not itself being separated, the soul exercises its influence on the separated parts, presumably through the operation of a fluid more subtle than human senses can detect, a fluid deriving its action from the thinking, immaterial entity Le Cat called “the sensitive soul.”21 This is the point on which Marat first engages Le Cat directly in A Philosophical Essay on Man. Taking up the vitalist’s claim that the soul is not material and does not occupy any place in the same manner as a material substance, Marat responds with a question. “But does it follow from thence, that it has no determinate seat, whence it extends its influence?”22 In fact, he argues, the seat of the soul is in the meninges of the brain. For as these membranes and their productions are the general organs of sensation, and as the soul is at the concourse of all the sensations of the body, its seat must be in that part where this concourse appears, viz. at the centre of all the organs of sensation; these membranes are this centre.23

Strictly speaking, this proposition is not in itself a significant departure from Le Cat’s view. He too had found the seat of the soul in “the envelopes of the brain, the dura mater and the pia mater.”24 But in emphasizing the specific location of the seat of the soul at this precise point in his argument, Marat is nonetheless moving away from Le Cat’s vitalism. He follows the Rouennais surgeon in giving primacy to the nervous system (“the nerves only, and the nervous productions, are the seat and organs of motion”25), but reduces the role of the soul by ruling out the notion that it acts directly by means of its dispersal through the body. Citing the fact that severed limbs continue to move for a while, he concludes that the soul is neither the immediate source of movement in the body nor in any way diffused through it. Sensation, he argues, is produced by the operation of the nervous fibres in response to stimulation; sensations are communicated to the soul by the nerves. It follows that “the body is

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therefore sensible of itself independently of the soul, since irritability is a property of nervous fibres.”26 It is important to note that Marat is explicit here in making sensibility a function of the irritability of the nervous fibres. “Denying sensibility to the body, and giving it entirely to the soul, is to oppose evidence itself,” he insists. He is even prepared to speculate that “sensibility probably belongs to matter, as a property dependent on its organization. Moreover, sensibility extends itself to every part of the body, in the same manner as life, and animates these parts no longer than while the fluid of the nerves remains … and while the combination of the organs continues unchanged.”27 In effect, Marat is abandoning Le Cat’s vitalist arguments for the pervasive action of the soul throughout the body, while at the same time muddying Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility. In Marat’s analysis, sensations are communicated to the soul by the nervous fluid, and the soul acts on this fluid to produce voluntary motion. How can a material substance act on an immaterial one or vice-versa? Marat acknowledges that such a thing is impossible to explain, given that “we are entirely ignorant of the essence of things.”28 But he does advance a theory as to how the irritability of the nervous fibres produces sensation. Again, this argument proves more mechanistic than Le Cat’s. If, having tied the nerve above a muscle, one presses on the nerve with the fingers while sliding them towards the muscle, then the muscle will contract. From this, Marat concludes that the soul produces movement through impulsive motion in the nervous fluid and that, conversely, the flow of nervous fluid back to the brain communicates sensation to the soul. Le Cat had rejected this idea that sensation is communicated through impulsion, presumably because it appeared too mechanistic for his taste. There is no relationship, he insisted, between the degree of pressure of an external object on the body and the intensity of the sensation received (a sharp instrument can produce greater pain than the pressure of the palm of the hand). Marat counters with the claim that it is not the pressure applied but the irritation of the nervous fibres that pushes the nervous fluid back towards the brain. The stimulus irritates the nervous fibres, making them contract and thus impel the nervous fluid.29 It follows from this argument, in Marat’s view, that “the nervous fluid is the band which unites the soul and the body.”30 Flowing through the minute channels in the coating of the nerves, it is the organ of sensation; flowing through the cavities in the nerves, it is the principle of motion. It operates as the instrument of the soul in the case of voluntary movement and directly (independently of the soul) in the production of involuntary

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motion. Marat’s description of the composition of this fluid remains essentially the same as Le Cat’s. He too thinks of it as a twofold substance comprising “a spirituous and extremely subtil part, called animal spirits” and “a gelatinous juice, distinguished by the name of the nervous lymph.”31 But he makes no effort to link these “animal spirits” to a universal spirit of the universe, understood as the moving force of all that is. Even though he retains much of Le Cat’s physiology, he de-spiritualizes it in significant ways. He substitutes mechanistic explanations for vitalistic ones as far as he can without appearing to fall into materialism. Closer to Haller’s thinking than to Le Cat’s in this regard, he contains the soul within a specific site, while still affirming its existence as an immaterial entity.

A Physiology of Mind The second volume of A Philosophical Essay on Man is devoted to exploring (in substantial detail) the reciprocal influence of the soul and the body. The force of the latter nevertheless emerges as considerably more powerful than that of the former. A fever can lead us to dream that we are dying of thirst; a wound can render us delirious; an acute illness can weaken our memory and understanding. “To behold the manner in which the soul partakes of the affections of the body,” Marat concludes from such phenomena, “we should almost be induced to believe it material.”32 Indeed, atmospheric changes and differences in climate so obviously affect the mind and spirit that “seeing that the soul is subject to physical laws, and is under the influence of the heavens and earth, we might be induced to believe that Man is wholly material.”33 Marat hastens to counterbalance such an inference by asserting that the influence of the soul on the body is no less immediate. He reminds his reader that friendship, love, and joy express themselves in physical symptoms, as can “terror, that painful emotion excited in the soul by fearful exclamations, the cries of fury or the sight of imminent danger, and always compounded of dread of the object terrifying us, and an unconquerable desire to avoid it.”34 Nonetheless, he allows, the power of the soul over the body is less complete and less continuous; many of the ongoing functions of life proceed independently of the soul or are affected by it only occasionally or indirectly. “The influence of the body on the soul is permanent; the influence of the soul on the body only momentary.”35 When it comes to explaining these phenomena, Marat acknowledges that he is entering hazardous territory littered by “the vain efforts of so

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many great geniuses.” Yet “notwithstanding so great a combination of prejudices, and the ridicule inseparable from such an undertaking,” he is ready to “attempt the explanation of these mysteries, enter this dark labyrinth, sound this immense abyss, and carry light into those regions of darkness …; in a word, reduce to fixed principles a science, wherein every thing is yet hypothetic, obscure and mysterious.”36 He insists that the interaction of soul and body, mind and matter, must ultimately remain “a mystery impenetrable to human understanding.”37 He nevertheless promises, by proceeding empirically from effects to cause, to uncover the principles underlying their reciprocal relations. To this end, the question of the mechanics of the soul’s influence on the body is resolved relatively quickly since Marat has already shown that the interaction is effected entirely by the nervous fluid. Bodily expressions of emotions, he argues, depend entirely on variations in the intensity and volume of the flow of this fluid into the nervous fibres and the muscles, and particularly to such organs as the heart, the plexus nervosi, and the diaphragm. Exactly how emotional variation produces changes in the action of the nervous fluid, he does not claim to explain. He is more engaged in showing how emotions themselves are produced by bodily sensations. Marat repudiates as too materialistic any effort to relate emotional dispositions, or intellectual powers, to specific physiological structures of the brain. This, he maintains, would be to attribute to the body the properties of the soul. At the same time, he is eager to show that the sensibility of the soul is affected by the sensibility of the body, which in turn derives from its physical organization. Emotions arise in response to sensations, which vary with the physical propensity of the body to receive them. It follows that the more delicate the body, and the more intense its sensibility, the more vivid the emotions and the greater the subjection of the soul to the body. In Marat’s analysis, the same logic applies to thinking as to feeling. Individuals will be rational or imaginative, sane or mad, depending on the sensibility of their physical organization. “Organization alone causes almost* every difference which is observed between souls.… Thus everything in Nature is influenced by physical laws.”38 This consideration underlies a statement of a kind of physiology of intellectuality. Thinking, “this perpetual fermentation of reason” (note the materialist resonances of the metaphor) is activated by the passions, which emerge as functions of bodily responsiveness to sensation. “Men therefore are more or less ingenious, as they possess greater or less sensibility.”39 Too delicate a sensibility, Marat maintains, will lead to a chaos of

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indistinct ideas. To yield clarity and profundity, the mind must be united to organs composed of strong and elastic fibres. This is not to say that all those endowed with a vigorous constitution are profound. Without further training, such people cannot attain “that sublime knowledge, which is derived from the constant study of Nature … their minds may be congenial with the minds of Pope and Voltaire, but will never rise to the dignity of Newton’s or de Montesquieu’s; they may be called men of wit and learning, but never men of depth.”40 Whether this passing slight caught Voltaire’s eye before he wrote a review that ripped into the later French version of A Philosophical Essay on Man we are unlikely ever to know. Marat remained faithful in his judgment of Montesquieu, but Newton was to be his next scientific target. His rating of intellects reminds us, though, that he was measuring himself against the Greats. He could not close this work without again casting his intellectual endeavours in the agonistic mode. “Whatever the object may be, the passions ever actuate the mind; by their activity its faculties unfold and rise to perfection. To arrive at excellence of any kind, Man must be animated by some passion; and the more violent his eagerness to succeed, the more efficacious are his efforts for that purpose. For only the violent passions produce illustrious, heroic and great men: he who is animated by no passion, does nothing to render himself illustrious, and is wholly insignificant.”41 Marat is determined to avoid, in one way or another, the latter fate. From a defence of the vanishing immaterial soul, Marat seems here to be shifting towards a physiology of the agonistic intellect. He had started his book in the face of the danger notoriously represented by La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine – the danger that the immaterial soul could be banished, or simply disappear, from eighteenth-century physiology. Vitalism, towards which Le Cat pointed him, offered an obvious alternative to materialism. As his thinking developed, though, he also moved away from Le Cat’s notion of the soul as everywhere infusing the body. He wanted to save the immortal soul by giving it a firm physiological location and mode of action. But this effort brought him closer than he would acknowledge to the materialism he was aiming to refute. In effect, he was left caught between a vitalist physiology that found the soul everywhere in the body and a materialist physiology that found it nowhere. Both threatened to distribute being and consciousness. But Marat wanted to concentrate being and consciousness, not to distribute them. He fell back on a physiology of great souls motivated by intense, agonistic passions.

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Despite his loud claims to originality, Marat scarcely revolutionized the science of man. His enquiries lay well within the bounds of what counted for normal science in this field in the mid-eighteenth century.42 He would not abandon the idea of the soul, or replace it explicitly with a physiology of the brain, as the celebrated doctor Cabanis was to do a couple of decades later. Nevertheless, by stressing the importance of physical organization in the development of mental perception and emotional sensibility, he participated in the broad movement towards the physiological treatment of the relationship between the moral and the physical that Cabanis finally turned into a research program for the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut de France when it was established in 1795. By that time, of course, Marat was dead, remembered (among other things) as a declared enemy of any kind of scientific academy. Why do these early writings of Marat matter? They do indeed allow us to place him in relation to a broad stream of vitalistic thinking as he moved from a confrontation with the animist vitalism of Le Cat, skirted the vitalist materialism of Bordeu and Diderot, and headed (almost reluctantly) in the direction of a conception of organization that would displace the body/soul distinction. While they can scarcely be said to add significantly to our understanding of vitalism as a more general phenomenon, they do suggest how thin a line there was between vitalism and materialism. Vitalism opposed mechanism, but it could mutate into a physiological materialism. Le Cat’s “sensitive soul” distributed pervasively throughout the body could metamorphose into Diderot’s conscious “moi” emerging from the interactive organization of matter. We can, of course, say that we know Marat better as a result of considering his early ideas. But is there really any significant connection to be made between the young medical practitioner chopping away at bits of living tissue in search of the soul and the later revolutionary numbering the heads to be lopped off in the name of the people? I think there may be. It is striking that despite the physiological thrust and materialist tendency of his arguments, Marat would not let go of the immaterial soul. It is striking, too, that he insisted, against Le Cat, that the soul could not be imagined as a spiritual principle diffused throughout the body, that it must have a central, sovereign location from which it directed the body through the agency of the nervous fluid. This impulse seems to have carried over from his early philosophical and medical thinking to his later politics. He wanted energy and spirit in the political physiology of the people, not the lethargy and weakness of a mass undermined by corruption and lulled to sleep by crafty politicians. He

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wanted vital force, physical presence, and political immediacy to sustain a principle of embodied popular sovereignty constantly at risk of moral corruption and decay on the one hand, and of alienation and dissipation through distributive practices of representation on the other.

NOTES 1 An Essay on the Human Soul (1772) was revised for inclusion in A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773). This latter work was further revised for a second edition in 1775, then expanded and translated for publication as De l’homme, ou Des principes et des loix de l’influence de l’âme sur le corps, et du corps sur l’âme: Par J.P. Marat, Docteur en Médecine, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1775). 2 The best biography to date is Olivier Coquard, Jean-Paul Marat (Paris, 1993). The most recent study in English is Clifford D. Conner, Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution (London, 2012), a slim volume to be supplemented by Conner’s account of Marat’s (mostly later) scientific work at www.maratscience.com and by the very substantial analysis of this same material offered by Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), 290–330. Jacques de Cock, Marat avant 1789 (Lyon, 2003), also available at Google Livres, offers a rich compendium of materials relating to Marat’s prerevolutionary career. 3 La Correspondance de Marat, ed. Charles Vellay (Paris, 1908), 25–6. 4 An Essay on the Human Soul (London, 1772), 36–7. 5 Ibid., 40. 6 Ibid., 41. 7 Ibid., 44. 8 A Philosophical Essay on Man, being an Attempt to investigate the Principles and Laws of the Reciprocal Influence of the Soul on the Body, 2 vols. (London, 1773), 1:iii. References are to the first edition, as available in Eighteenth Century Collections Online; a second edition with minor changes appeared in 1775. This latter is the basis of the Gale ECCO print edition (2011). 9 Ibid., 1:xx. 10 Ibid., 1:xxvi. 11 Ibid., 1:33. 12 Ibid., 1:xxiii. 13 Denis Diderot, “Eléments de physiologie,” in Ouvres completes de Diderot, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris, 1875–9), 9:270–1. This work remained unpublished in Diderot’s lifetime.

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14 According to a modern editor, Diderot borrowed more from Marat than from any other author, with the exception of the celebrated Albrecht von Haller. See Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, ed. Jean Mayer (Paris, 1964), xliii. 15 Haller’s paper was read to the Royal Society of Sciences in Gôttingen in 1752 and published (in Latin) in the proceedings of that society the following year. A French version, translated and with a preface by the eminent Swiss physician Simon André Tissot, appeared in Lausanne in 1755. An English version of Tissot’s edition, also published in 1755, is reprinted, with an introduction by Owsei Temkin, in Shirley A. Roe, ed., The Natural Philosophy of Albrecht von Haller (New York, 1981). Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998), 13–42, offers an illuminating discussion of the implications of Haller’s paper in the context of discussions of the soul-body relationship in eighteenth-century physiology. 16 “Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals,” in The Natural Philosophy of Albrecht von Haller, ed. Shirley A. Roe, 695; Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 26–7. On La Mettrie, see also Kathleen Wellman, Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, NC, 1992). 17 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 2005), passim. 18 Le Cat, Traité des sensations et des passions en général, et des sens en particulier, 3 vols. (Paris, 1767–8), 1:xxxvi, 60–1, 81–2, 114–21. 19 Ibid., 1:85. 20 Le Cat, Traité de l’existance, de la nature et des propriétés du fluide des nerfs, et principalement de son action dans le mouvement musculaire, ouvrage couronné en 1753 par l’Académie de Berlin, suivi des Dissertations sur la sensibilité des meninges, des tendons, etc., l’insensibilité du cerveau, la structure des nerfs, l’irritabilité Hallerienne, etc. (Berlin, 1765), 126. 21 Ibid., 303–7. 22 A Philosophical Essay on Man, 1:42. 23 Ibid., 49–50. 24 Le Cat, Traité des sensations, 1:221. 25 A Philosophical Essay on Man, 1:39. 26 Ibid., 1:41. 27 Ibid., 1:46–7. 28 Ibid., 1:57. 29 Ibid., 1:59–63. 30 Ibid., 1:63. 31 Ibid., 1:68. 32 Ibid., 2:16.

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Ibid., 2:34. Ibid., 2:44. The physiology of terror is considered further on 2:82–3. Ibid., 2:37. Ibid., 2:61. Ibid., 2:62. Ibid., 2:261. Marat is quick, though, to use the asterisk to note, “I pretend not to subject the whole to physical laws; I am well assured that the soul partly receives its character from moral causes.” Ibid., 2:154–5. Italics in the original. Ibid., 2:183. Ibid., 2:155. Fernando Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology, trans. Saskia Brown (Chicago, 2011), 105–7, mentions Marat briefly as typical of the eighteenth-century conception of humans as composite beings.

chapter six

The Vital Organism in the Thought of Humboldt and Mill K R I S PA N G B U R N

Looking back on On Liberty (1859), his classic defence of individual freedom, John Stuart Mill confessed that “the only author who had preceded me in their assertion of whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was Humboldt.”1 Mill was referring to the philosopher and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose essay The Limits of State Action (Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen, 1791) helped him to formulate some of On Liberty’s principal ideas. Like Humboldt, Mill elaborated a vision of a minimalist state that afforded maximum freedom for human energies. Given Mill’s debt to Humboldt, it is not surprising that scholars have devoted much attention to investigating the continuities between the two thinkers’ political philosophies. One point of continuity that has been largely overlooked, however, is the impact of the life sciences on Humboldt’s and Mill’s liberal theories of government. In this essay, I argue that they based their political philosophies on an understanding of the self that they modelled partly after the biological organism. I claim that their tendency to regard the self as a vital organism had far-reaching consequences not only for their ideas about personal liberty but also for their visions of social progress. By demonstrating the central importance of the organism in the thought of two of history’s most influential liberal theorists, I aim to add to the growing body of research that suggests that the late eighteenth-century turn to “vitalism” in the life sciences transformed the human sciences as well.

Humboldt’s Understanding of the Self as an Organism Scholars remind us that our understanding of what exactly constitutes “the self” varies widely depending on time and place. The idea of the self has changed considerably over time, and research indicates that these

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changes have often been linked to paradigm shifts in the natural sciences. One such shift occurred in mid-seventeenth-century Europe with the emergence of a mechanist understanding of nature. Mechanists’ attempts to explain life by means of the laws of physics revolutionized how people conceived of their bodies in relation to their selves. Nearly all of the key traits that had traditionally been regarded as being intrinsic to the self were suddenly explained away as the accidental products of mechanical events in the flesh. As mechanico-causal explanations were extended to embrace the realm of feeling, the moral core of the self became so hollowed out as to be largely devoid of content. Nowhere was this more evident than in Descartes’s famous pronouncement, “I think, therefore I am.” That statement suggested that the self was captured entirely in the mind’s ability to reflect on the fact that it was thinking. In the words of one scholar, the Cartesian self was “depersonalized, deindividualized, and dequalified; that is, stripped of qualities, leaving thought as the self’s only attribute.”2 Descartes’s reductive understanding of selfhood was challenged in the latter half of the eighteenth century by the emergence of an antimechanistic, vitalist vision of nature.3 Those who subscribed to this vision claimed that the model of the machine was ill suited to explain the functions of living beings, which they defined as “organisms.” Organisms were believed to differ from machines in three key ways. First, and most important, they were thought to possess their own powers of movement. These powers included such things as the heart’s ability to contract, the nerves’ sensitivity, and the stomach’s digestive energy. Unlike animist thinkers, vitalists did not equate such forces with the soul or with God. Instead, they argued that these energies “emerged” spontaneously out of matter when it was arranged into an “organized body,” although how and why this happened remained a mystery. Thus, the concept of the organism returned to nature a degree of agency that had been denied it by mechanist philosophy. Second, vitalists claimed that organisms’ indwelling powers pushed them to develop towards certain ends. Whereas the model of the machine had allowed for neither development nor goal in nature, the idea of the organism reintroduced these concepts into natural philosophy. Finally, vitalists asserted that, contrary to machines, no two organisms were identical. Researchers attributed the essential individuality of the organism to the uniqueness of its vital energies, which were thought to vary due to structural differences. The idea of the organism thus entailed a shift away from the perception of uniformity in nature towards the recognition of diversity and complexity.

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Vitalists’ claim that living beings were imbued with their own moving powers led some contemporaries to reject the mechanist understanding of selfhood in favour of a more active, developmental, and individualized concept of self. Among those who embraced this new understanding was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Scholars have shown that Wilhelm was deeply interested in the late Enlightenment’s vitalist vision of nature, in part because his brother, Alexander, was one of the researchers who had helped to elaborate that vision.4 Peter Reill has convincingly argued that Wilhelm set out to revolutionize the cultural sciences by patterning them after the “ideas, methods, and assumptions” of vitalism in the life sciences.5 While Reill has explored the consequences of Humboldt’s engagement with vitalism for his studies of linguistics and history, little research has been carried out into his politics in this regard. I believe that Humboldt’s The Limits of State Action, first written in 1791 but not published in its entirety until 1851, can be read as an attempt to remake political philosophy along the lines of vitalist natural philosophy because, in that work, Humboldt proposed a theory of personal liberty that relied heavily on an organismic understanding of the self. While scholars have suggested that Humboldt’s understanding of the self was informed by diverse influences ranging from Greek art to Leibniz’s philosophy, I suspect that the concept of the organism was among the most important of these influences because it best serves to explain Humboldt’s assertion that individuals possessed their own developmental powers.6 Throughout The Limits of State Action, he repeatedly praised certain vaguely defined “energies” (Kräfte) within human beings. Rather than asserting that the power of reason was man’s defining attribute, he declared that “energy appears to me to be the first and unique virtue of mankind.”7 Two things stand out about Humboldt’s understanding of this essential human “energy.” First, he regarded it as predominantly emotional in nature. Second, he asserted that it originated in what he called man’s Sinnlichkeit, a term that scholars have struggled to define precisely, but which is roughly analogous to “sensuality.”8 Paul Sweet has cautioned against this simple translation of Sinnlichkeit, however, noting that “there are elements of ‘sensuousness’ and ‘sensuality’ in it, but neither of these English words is encompassing enough. Instinctual urges, animal drives, the feeling for beauty, and above all creative power are part of it.”9 I believe that Humboldt derived his complex notion of Sinnlichkeit in part from his study of vitalist natural philosophy. In particular, he seems to have formulated that concept by drawing an analogy to the vital force

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called “sensibility,” which researchers postulated to explain sense perception. Of all the mysterious powers that eighteenth-century thinkers thought animated the human body, they regarded sensibility as the most interesting because it alone was believed to bridge the gap between the physical and moral worlds due to its location in the nerves, the alleged mediators between body and soul.10 While this force was primarily credited with generating sensations, contemporaries were intrigued by the possibility that it was involved in the creation of emotions as well. Speculation that sensibility possessed a moral dimension may have inspired Humboldt to propose Sinnlichkeit as its psychic equivalent, a kind of “vital force” that gave rise not to feelings in the body, but to sentiments in the mind. Support for this view can be found in Christina Sauter’s claim that Humboldt conceived of Sinnlichkeit not only “in a narrow, epistemological sense as the receptivity and responsiveness of the sense organs, which elicit corresponding feelings in the soul,” but also “in a wider, ontological sense” that “included the emotional aspect of a human being, captured in his feelings, inclinations, and passions.”11 By proposing that emotions were generated by an active principle in the psyche called Sinnlichkeit, Humboldt departed from the mechanist understanding of selfhood in multiple respects. Most fundamentally, he rejected the mechanists’ mind-body dualism by embracing emotions as an essential aspect of the self.12 As we have seen, Descartes had excluded feelings from the self’s moral core, arguing that they were the product of a chain of bodily events set in motion by external circumstances. Thomas Dixon has thus argued that, following Descartes, many thinkers conceived of emotions as little more than “a set of morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings.”13 In contrast, Humboldt argued that emotions arose spontaneously within oneself as expressions of his Sinnlichkeit, not as the result of any mechanical process. By making this claim, Humboldt suggested that the self was much more active than the mechanists supposed. Whereas Descartes had conceived of the self in static terms as a kind of mirror that reflected its own thoughts, Humboldt argued that the “impressions, inclinations, and passions” spawned by one’s Sinnlichkeit breathed life into the self in the same way that vital forces animated living bodies.14 He asserted that “wherever … sensuous impressions, etc., are not apparent, all energy is dead, and nothing good or great can flourish. They constitute the original source of all spontaneous activity.… In general, they animate and quicken all concepts and images with a greater and more varied activity, suggest new views, [and] point out hitherto unnoticed aspects.”15 Humboldt’s

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language – his use of words like “quicken,” “animate,” and “spontaneous activity” – could have been culled from a vitalist medical treatise. In particular, his suggestion that an individual’s emotional “energies” directed his thoughts bears a suggestive resemblance to contemporary researchers’ claims that an organism’s vital powers were responsible for guiding its bodily functions. In addition to elaborating a more holistic and active conception of the self, Humboldt broke with the mechanists by arguing that selves, like organisms, strove to develop themselves towards certain ends. The issue of self-development – what German thinkers called Bildung – is, in fact, the central theme of The Limits of State Action, which revolves around the thorny question of whether the state should interfere in people’s lives in an effort to promote their moral and intellectual advancement. Throughout that treatise, Humboldt relied heavily on the metaphor of organic growth to articulate his conception of Bildung. For instance, in one frequently cited passage, he likened self-development to the growth of a tree. The richer a man’s feelings become in ideas, and his ideas in feelings, the more transcendent his nobility.… The highest point of human existence is this flowering. In the vegetable world, the simple and less graceful form seems to prefigure the more perfect bloom and symmetry of the flower which it precedes, and into which it gradually expands. Everything hastens towards the moment of blossoming. What first springs from the seed is not nearly so attractive. The full thick trunk, the broad leaves rapidly detaching themselves from each other, seem to require some fuller development; the more tender leaves seem longing to unite themselves, and draw closer and closer together, until the central calyx of the flower seems to satisfy this desire.16

Humboldt suggested that self-development, like the growth of a tree, proceeded as the unfolding of an inner potential. He hinted that just as the tree’s blossom was the final outcome of an in-born “desire” within the seed, so too was a person’s character the result of a developmental tendency within the self – namely, its active principle of Sinnlichkeit. According to Humboldt, the “seed” of a person’s character was his Sinnlichkeit because it provided him with his emotional receptivity. As his Sinnlichkeit found greater expression, his unique emotional make-up would manifest, his character would deepen, and he would become more distinct from other people. Humboldt likened this process of

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individuation to the growth of different varieties of plants, which in their seed states are virtually indistinguishable, but in whose mature forms all traits are visibly expressed. Jerrold Seigel has thus aptly termed Humboldt’s concept of the self “expressivist,” meaning that it “took form as the unfolding or articulation of an already present intention or direction.”17 The example of the tree suggested to Humboldt that the purpose of Bildung was not merely the realization of a person’s individuality but his moral improvement as well. All organic growth, he argued, could be understood as a progression from an initial state of crude matter through a series of increasingly refined forms. In the case of the tree, the seed gave birth to a tender shoot, which developed into a “full thick trunk,” followed by “broad leaves” and finally “the central calyx of the flower.” Humboldt regarded this process as a kind of moral progression.18 The self, he reasoned, followed the same developmental trajectory as the tree. Just as the tree’s growth was an ascension from the raw seed to a delicate flower, so too would the self evolve from sensual stirrings to more spiritual impulses. In this sense, Humboldt suggested that, like the tree’s blossom, the morally perfected self had its antecedents in the realm of crude matter, represented by its active principle of Sinnlichkeit. He believed that the more a person was allowed to cultivate his emotional receptivity, the more intense and refined his feelings would become, and thus the more fully he would realize himself as a moral being. Sauter has therefore concluded that, for Humboldt, man was wholly “reliant on his Sinnlichkeit for his moral perfection.”19 Despite Humboldt’s tendency to exalt Sinnlichkeit as the wellspring of the passions, it would be a mistake to argue that he conceived of moral perfection in terms of a privileging of emotion over reason. Rather, he explained that his praise of Sinnlichkeit was merely “intended to win for it greater freedom and esteem” in the wake of mechanist philosophy’s devaluation of emotion.20 He continued to assert that nature’s design with regard to man was “that his powers of thought and sensibility should always be indissolubly linked in the proper proportions.”21 Humboldt thus understood moral perfection as a balancing of feeling and reason, leading him to scorn what he called “one-sidedness” (Einseitigkeit) in favour of “a truly beautiful life, equally free from coldness on the one hand and enthusiasm on the other.”22 He likely arrived at this moral ideal as a result of not only his studies of Greek art and philosophy (as is often assumed) but also his knowledge of vitalist medicine. As Keith Michael Baker has suggested in his essay in this volume,23 vitalist physicians often

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argued that an organism’s health was dependent on the balance of its component energies. Indeed, doctors commonly attributed disease to the upsetting of an organism’s inner harmony by outside factors, which they dubbed “unnaturals.” Contrary to my claim that Humboldt’s comparisons of the self to an organism were crucial to his understanding of Bildung, some scholars assert that we should resist the temptation to read too much into these comparisons. According to these researchers, the usefulness of the organism as a model for the self is severely limited by the fact that whereas living beings simply grow unconsciously, selves must exert discipline and effort in order to cultivate themselves.24 In my view, this objection overlooks the central role that Humboldt assigned to Sinnlichkeit in his theory of self-development. As I have suggested above, rather than being a purely intentional, rationally guided process, Bildung for Humboldt involved a heavy dose of unconscious urges and feelings that were generated by one’s emotional receptivity. Indeed, one scholar has recently suggested that Humboldt regarded the passions, and in particular erotic longing, as the very engine of self-development.25

Mill’s Adoption of an Organismic Understanding of the Self Writing almost seventy years after Humboldt, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) articulated in On Liberty an understanding of the self that was strikingly similar to that of the German thinker. Unlike Humboldt, however, Mill arrived at that understanding by means of a personal crisis. When he was twenty, he lapsed into a prolonged depression, “a dull state of nerves” that lasted off and on for four years.26 Mill’s depression stemmed in large part from his disillusionment with the mechanist view of the world that he had inherited from the rational Enlightenment through his father, James Mill. That mechanist vision left him feeling that he lacked the freedom to determine the course of his own life, which appeared to him to be determined by forces external to himself. If that sounds extreme, it must be remembered that Mill had been drilled from a young age in David Hartley’s “associationist” psychology, which posited that a person’s character was created entirely by his environment by means of the mechanical laws of association. Indeed, Mill later reflected that his education had left him feeling “as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control.”27

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Scholars usually attribute Mill’s overcoming his feelings of fatalism to his discovery of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I wish to argue, however, that he threw off the yoke of mechanist-determinism not just by reading poetry but also by tentatively embracing the theory of vitalism in the life sciences. This claim goes against the dominant understanding of Mill’s attitude towards nature. Seigel is not alone, for instance, in asserting that Mill rejected the vitalistic elements in Humboldt’s world view, “namely the part that made individuals’ expressions of underlying Kräfte … operative everywhere in nature.”28 While I disagree, I recognize that it is more difficult to demonstrate Mill’s engagement with vitalist theory than Humboldt’s, especially since that theory was modified over the course of the nineteenth century by the appearance of an “expanded” mechanism, which incorporated some of the vitalists’ central insights.29 Nevertheless, I believe that Mill did subscribe to a version of vitalism, one that was perhaps less strident than its eighteenth-century forebear in its assertion that mechanical explanations could never be found for the mysterious phenomena of life, but which nevertheless held firm to the idea of the organism as an autonomous being moved by its own energies. The roots of Mill’s shift from mechanism to a qualified vitalism can be traced, I believe, to his childhood. In 1820, when he was fourteen, he briefly escaped his father’s deterministic world view by going to France, where he spent a year in the company of the family of Samuel Bentham, the younger brother of Jeremy. Mill’s sojourn in France, which he would later describe as the happiest episode of his youth, was a transformative episode in his life.30 A fact frequently glossed over by his biographers is that during his time abroad, he developed a passionate interest in the study of living nature. In particular, he became captivated by botany. Collecting plants became his favourite pastime, probably in part because it provided a rare release from his gruelling regimen of book learning. Under the guidance of the Benthams’ son, George (who later became a famous botanist), Mill took frequent hikes into the mountains to gather specimens. Botany would become his lifelong passion. He continued to search for plants wherever his travels took him, eventually amassing a collection of over twelve thousand specimens from across Europe and India.31 He regularly submitted articles to botanical journals and corresponded with some of the leading botanists of his day.32 He even discovered several new species of plants. Not even his election to Parliament in 1865 could distract him from gathering specimens. One of

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his contemporaries described his shock when, strolling in the country one day, he stumbled across the dishevelled member of Parliament for City and Westminster “with his trousers turned up out of the mud, and armed with the tin insignia of his craft, busily occupied in the search after a marsh-loving rarity in a typical spongy wood on the clay to the north of London.”33 Aside from kindling his interest in plants, Mill’s visit to France was significant for his later turn to vitalism because that trip exposed him to anti-mechanist models of nature. On the recommendation of a chemist friend of the Benthams, he studied for six months at the University of Montpellier, where he attended lectures in chemistry, logic, and zoology. He also made sporadic visits to the medical school.34 It is well known that Montpellier was one of the most important centres of vitalist thought in Europe.35 Mill had ample opportunity to hear that vitalist vision expounded by his zoology professor, Jean-Michel Provençal. A disciple of Cuvier, Provençal corresponded with some of the leading vitalist researchers of his day, including Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he wrote a study on the respiration of fish.36 Mill’s notebook from this period indicates that Provençal lectured on, among other topics, the distinctions between organized bodies and inanimate matter.37 Whether those lessons in the vital properties of organisms made any immediate impression on the young Mill is doubtful, especially considering his complaints about having difficulty understanding Provençal’s rapid French speech.38 It appears that he returned to England in 1821 still very much of a mechanist. Yet Mill’s experiences in France seem to have planted seeds of doubt in his mind that matured a few years later. In his Autobiography, he recalled that sometime around 1828, he was led to meditate on the Law of the Composition of Forces, a core principle of Newtonian physics. According to that law, the total force of a series of actions could be determined by simply adding together the values of the component forces. Mill asked, “But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the introduction to that favorite of my boyhood, Thomson’s A System of Chemistry.”39 This passage indicates that during the period of his depression, Mill began to have doubts about the applicability of mechanicocausal explanations for the life sciences.

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By the early 1840s, his recognition of the limits of mechanical philosophy had evolved into something that looks very much like an affirmation of vitalism. In his first major publication, A System of Logic (1843), he explicitly articulated an understanding of living beings not as machines, but as “organized bodies.” All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.40

Mill argued that the vital “phenomena of life” were inexplicable by the laws of physics. He understood these forces in a manner consistent with late-eighteenth-century vitalism – that is, as structural properties arising out of the ordering (or, in Mill’s words, “juxtaposition”) of matter into organized bodies. Mill’s tentative embrace of the theory of the organism, every bit as much as his admiration for Wordsworth’s poetry, helped him to conquer his sense of fatalism because in the organism he discovered a new model for the self that allowed for human agency. Like Humboldt, Mill seems to have been inspired by the vitalist belief that organized bodies were moved by forces that arose out of inanimate matter to suggest that the self was animated by certain “energies” that emerged from its sensual aspect – namely, the emotions. The importance that he would come to attribute to his feelings represented a complete reversal of his earlier attitudes. As a boy, he had been taught to devalue his emotions, for he noted that his father had “expressed the greatest contempt” for “passionate emotions of all sorts,” even going so far as to declare them “a form of madness.”41 If at first he was untroubled by his passionless existence, over time he was forced to recognize that he had become a “reasoning machine” with “no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else.”42 Yet with his recognition that his feelings were the vital forces that breathed life into his self, he was delivered from the iron grip of determinism. He became convinced that his feelings were

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the inner drives that pushed back against the forces of his environment to give his character its distinct shape. In his Autobiography, he recalled the sense of liberation that followed his realization that “though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances.”43 From that moment onward, he observed, “the cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”44 On Liberty reflects Mill’s newfound faith in emotion as a kind of vital force that animates the self and guides its development. Throughout that essay, he repeatedly drew parallels between a person’s feelings and the vital energies within living beings, arguing that “strong impulses are but another name for energy.”45 One biographer has pointed out that “the words ‘energy,’ ‘active’ and ‘vital’ (or their derivatives) appear forty-four times in On Liberty, compared to thirty-one mentions of ‘individuality’ and forty-nine of ‘freedom.’”46 Moreover, like Humboldt, Mill frequently compared self-development to the growth of a plant, a metaphor that reflected his keen interest in botany.47 In the most vivid of these passages, he asserted that “human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”48 Here Mill equated the “inward forces” that directed a tree’s growth with the emotional energies within the self, suggesting that just as the tree’s vital powers impelled it to take a certain form, so too did a person’s feelings guide his development towards a specific moral character.49 Mill thus subscribed to something like Humboldt’s loosely teleological understanding of Bildung as a process whereby one’s character was partly predetermined by one’s emotional receptivity (what Humboldt called Sinnlichkeit). Mill also shared Humboldt’s belief that as selves cultivated their emotions, their characters would deepen, such that they would become increasingly distinct. This is what he meant when he asserted that “individuality is the same thing with development.”50 In this sense, Mill can also be said to have articulated an “expressivist” understanding of selfhood. Mill explained to his readers that a person’s expression of his emotions would result not only in a deepening of his individuality, but also in his moral improvement. He thus shared Humboldt’s belief that Bildung would enhance virtue, which he too understood as the outcome of a balancing of reason and feeling. The negative effects of his own lopsided education had convinced him that “the maintenance of a due balance among the faculties” was of “primary importance.”51 Throughout

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On Liberty, he complained that Victorian England’s overemphasis on reason had inhibited virtue by causing people to develop in a disastrously “one-sided” fashion. He suggested that if people were permitted to regain their natural balance of reason and emotion, a creative tension would result between these aspects of human nature that would serve to augment both. Researchers point out that Mill always struggled to achieve this balance within himself, probably owing to the emotional austerity of his upbringing. It was his wife, Harriet Taylor, whom he praised as the person who best embodied the ideal harmony of reason and sensibility that Humboldt called “the many-sided and vigorous character.”52

Self Development and the State Humboldt’s and Mill’s belief that selves, like organisms, were imbued with their own developmental drives had certain key implications for their liberal theories of government. Above all, that belief led both thinkers to reject any attempt by the state or society to fashion the self towards certain ends. In the past, the mechanist understanding of the self had fostered the view that character was the artificial product of external circumstances. Those who subscribed to this view proposed that people’s characters could be moulded in accordance with what was deemed most rational or what was believed to produce the greatest happiness. In contrast, Humboldt and Mill asserted that there was nothing artificial about character, which they understood as the outcome of an organic process of growth. They claimed that selves were destined to follow their own developmental trajectories, charted by their unique emotional receptivity, towards the realization of their distinct personalities. Both thinkers argued that neither the state nor society should interfere with this process. Humboldt’s and Mill’s conviction that selves should be permitted to evolve towards their own developmental goals owed a heavy debt to philosophers’ claims that organisms were ends in themselves. Following Leibniz, Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) had helped to revive the Aristotelian notion that a living being was a “natural end,” meaning that it was “cause and effect of itself.”53 There is some debate as to whether Kant really believed that organisms possessed a final purpose or whether he referred to “natural ends” only in a heuristic sense.54 Be that as it may, many readers – among them Humboldt – likely understood Kant’s teleological language quite literally. The idea that organisms were ends in themselves helped to inspire Humboldt to argue that, like a plant

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growing in the wild, the self existed for the sole purpose of developing itself. He thus warned against attempts by the state or society to guide this process towards a desired outcome, arguing that “the State may not make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes.”55 Humboldt’s insistence that self-development had no goal other than to increase individuality and heighten virtue has led David Sorkin to credit him with elaborating a “neo-humanist” ideal of Bildung that differed from the more practically oriented notions of self-development of his day.56 Mill clearly shared Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung as something to be pursued irrespective of any social benefits that might be accrued. Although he never ceased to identify himself as a utilitarian, he came to depart from the Benthamism of his youth by essentially redefining the concept of utility.57 Rather than desiring that which produced the greatest pleasure, he argued that only those practices that encouraged the development of one’s higher faculties of thinking and feeling could be said to possess utility.58 According to Humboldt and Mill, any attempt to shape people to certain ends was harmful because it stifled their emotional energies, leading to passivity and a loss of virtue. Humboldt thus opposed all policies designed to direct Bildung on the grounds that such initiatives curbed people’s emotions by forcing them into state-sanctioned channels. He argued that under such a regime, “men are neglected for things, and creative powers for results. A political community, organized and governed according to this system, resembles an agglomerated mass of living but lifeless instruments of action and enjoyment, rather than a multitude of active and enjoying entities.”59 He went on to predict that selves, sapped of their emotional spontaneity, would suffer a moral decline, for whereas “freedom heightens energy, and, as the natural consequence, promotes all kinds of liberality,” “coercion stifles energy, and engenders all selfish desires, and all the mean artifices of weakness.”60 Mill shared this belief, although he saw social custom, rather than the state, as the chief hindrance to self-development. Writing from the perspective of the conformist society that was Victorian England, he complained that the moral standard of his day was “to desire nothing strongly.”61 He blamed Britain’s atmosphere of Protestant self-denial for blunting people’s emotions, resulting in “weak feelings and weak energies.”62 Both men believed that, aside from creating a passive population with feeble moral impulses, the stifling of energy that resulted from state or social coercion was detrimental to society because it led to a

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loss of individuality. As we have seen, they argued that the realization of one’s character depended largely on his ability to cultivate his particular emotional sensibility. They reasoned that any effort to guide the development of others inhibited that cultivation, thereby depriving people of the very means by which their characters could unfold. Humboldt thus declared that “however wise and salutary” the state’s attempt to supervise its citizens’ Bildung might appear, such an attempt “invariably produces national uniformity, and a constrained and unnatural manner of acting.”63 Whereas Humboldt reproached the paternalistic state for “wishing to make men into machines,” Mill blamed public opinion for fostering a mechanical uniformity among the populace.64 He compared selves whose characters had been forced to conform to society’s moral standards to trees that had been “clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them.”65 Humboldt’s and Mill’s tendency to understand the self as a vital organism thus helps to explain their advocacy of a minimalist state that guaranteed maximum freedom for human energies. That understanding suggested that in order for selves, like plants, to unfold themselves, they required autonomy to express their developmental drives. Yet both thinkers asserted that freedom alone was not enough to ensure that selves would reach their full potential. They argued that there was also a second requirement for Bildung – namely, what Humboldt called “a richer diversity of circumstances and situations.”66 Like Humboldt’s and Mill’s calls for personal liberty, their demands for a diversity of experiences followed from the analogy that they drew between the self and the organism. Both thinkers acknowledged that living beings were not closed systems akin to Leibniz’s “windowless” monads.67 They recognized that organisms have reciprocal relationships with their environments. If a plant is to grow to its full stature, it needs not only the liberty to express its inward drives but also the proper soil and climate. Central to both thinkers’ theories of self-development was their conviction that the environment that went furthest to nurture Bildung was the one that presented the self with the greatest possible variety of experiences. They reasoned that the richer one’s experiences, the greater the opportunity to cultivate one’s Sinnlichkeit and thus the more manifold and refined the emotional energies that would be generated.68 Humboldt hinted at the environment’s impact on a person’s Bildung when he asserted that “every situation in which men find themselves, every circumstance communicates a definite shape to their internal nature.”69 Mill was also keenly aware of the role played by environment in self-development.

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He observed that “different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.”70 Because both men recognized that Bildung was determined by external factors every bit as much as internal drives, they argued that statesmen must concern themselves not only with granting people the autonomy to cultivate their feelings but also with encouraging that cultivation by ensuring a diversity of experiences for all. Due to a tendency to overlook Humboldt’s and Mill’s second requirement for Bildung, later commentators have sometimes claimed to see a contradiction between these thinkers’ calls for freedom and their willingness to allow a degree of state intervention in people’s lives. Scholars have accused Humboldt, for example, of behaving in a way that is inconsistent with the ideals he expressed in The Limits of State Action by serving as the architect of Prussia’s educational system between 1809 and 1810. Whereas in his treatise he argued that people ought to be privately tutored to avoid state indoctrination, eighteen years later he worked to establish universities and secondary schools under the aegis of the Prussian king. Some researchers have tried to resolve this apparent contradiction by arguing that Humboldt never intended for his treatise to be anything more than a theoretical exercise.71 Yet as Sorkin has pointed out, the alleged inconsistency between Humboldt’s thoughts and actions disappears when one considers that he believed himself to be fulfilling Bildung’s second precondition – that is, he was working to broaden the public’s access to a diversity of experiences.72 Likewise, Mill’s understanding of self-development in terms of an organism’s growth helps to explain how his defence of individual freedom in On Liberty can be reconciled with his advocacy of a certain measure of state involvement in people’s lives. Contrary to the extreme libertarian reading of On Liberty, Mill hinted that government could, in some cases, intrude into the social and economic realms in order to ensure that no group was presented with experiences that were so circumscribed as to prevent its members from developing themselves. Mill enshrined this second prerequisite for Bildung in his famous “Harm Principle,” which stated that a person was free to develop himself only to the extent that he did not obstruct another’s development. His desire to ensure a diversity of experiences for all is also evident in his shift from the Ricardian economics of his youth towards a more socially conscious liberalism. While he always remained a strong supporter of the free market, he came to depart from pure laissez-faire principles by asserting that trade was

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a “social act,” such that it “comes within the jurisdiction of society.”73 Indeed, later in his life, he emerged as a strong supporter of workers’ cooperatives, and he even showed some sympathy for trade unions.74

Liberalism, the Organism, and Social Progress I wish to suggest that Humboldt and Mill applied the model of the organism not merely to selves, but also to societies. Scholars do not generally endorse this view. The dominant opinion is that both thinkers articulated a highly individualistic, almost atomistic, vision of social life. For example, Seigel has asserted that “society was, for Mill as for his utilitarian forbears, an agglomeration of individuals.”75 Similarly, Frederick Beiser has claimed that Humboldt and his fellow German liberals regarded society “as nothing more than the sum of the individuals who compose it.”76 Humboldt, in particular, has been accused of having considered society mainly from the perspective of what it could contribute to an individual’s development, rather than what the individual could contribute to the development of society.77 I think that the tendency in the scholarship to portray Humboldt and Mill as hyper-individualists stems in part from confusion surrounding their theory of the organism. Because they readily acknowledged the importance of external factors on a nation’s development, it is assumed that they rejected an organic model of society, which posits that social progress is driven by some larger organizing principle, such as a “spirit” or “energy” within the populace. This assumption is flawed, however, because it rests on the belief that organic growth does not involve contingent factors – that is, that organisms are “closed systems” whose forms are entirely predetermined in accordance with some inner plan. As we have seen, neither Humboldt nor Mill subscribed to such a rigidly teleological understanding of the organism. Instead, both men suggested that the form of an organized body depended largely on the material circumstances that conditioned its in-dwelling powers. On the basis of this more open-ended model of the organism, Humboldt and Mill could point to an array of environmental influences (things like climate, landscape, food, and educational opportunities) that shaped the expression of a society’s vital energies, thereby engendering vastly different modes of living among nations.78 By understanding societies as the products of goal-directed forces that were swayed by external factors, Humboldt and Mill hinted at a vision of social progress that was only loosely teleological, but that nevertheless preserved the

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assumption of a natural end. Both men continued to assert that nations, like selves, evolved towards a specific telos – namely, the realization of their moral characters. According to both thinkers, the realization of a nation’s character occurred in much the same way as the expression of an individual’s character. It will be recalled that both men believed that the morally perfected self’s emotional energies existed in a state of balance that served to intensify and refine each other, thereby enabling one’s moral character to emerge with greater fullness and vitality. Similarly, Humboldt and Mill hinted that in the social organism, selves struggling to realize their characters incited one another to give more complete expression to their individualities, thereby causing the collective personality of the nation to manifest with greater clarity and force. Thus, the vital forces that animated the organized body – whether it be the self or society – served the organism’s larger purpose by pursuing their blind drive for self-expression. Vitalist theorists often used the image of the insect swarm to illustrate this relationship of mutual causation between an organism and its component energies. The Montpellier physician Ménuret, for instance, observed of bees that one “sees them press against each other, mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body.”79 Based on their belief that societies, like organisms, were characterized by the interdependence of the whole and its parts, Humboldt and Mill argued that by developing oneself, the individual aided society’s development as well. Humboldt explained that “it is through a social union … based on the internal wants and capacities of its members, that each is enabled to participate in the rich collective resources of all the others.”80 Likewise, Mill stated that “in proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a great fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.”81 While it is true that both thinkers asserted that Bildung ought to be pursued as an end in itself, this conviction did not contradict their belief that the self’s striving to realize its full potential occurred in the service of the social organism’s developmental objectives. Neither thinker regarded the nation’s development as merely a fortuitous side effect of the individual’s Bildung; rather, both saw social progress as the organizing principle that helped to prompt and

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guide the self’s impulse to unfold itself, regardless of whether, by doing so, it was aware of the goal towards which it contributed. In this sense, Humboldt and Mill suggested that like the vital forces that competed for expression within a living being, the self’s desire to express itself was at once both purely selfish and wholly altruistic. Finally, both thinkers believed that like the Bildung of the individual, social progress occurred in the service of a larger systemic goal: mankind’s moral improvement. They thus applied the model of the organism not only to selves and societies but also to humanity as a whole. Nations, they hinted, were the vital energies that sought expression within the “super-organism” that is mankind. In the same way that an individual’s Bildung aided the development of society, so too did a society’s development make possible the progress of the human race. This was because when one people succeeded in giving greater expression to its character, it stimulated other peoples to manifest their own national characters more fully. Humboldt envisioned a world “in which energy would keep pace with refinement and richness of character, and in which, from the endlessly ramified interconnection between all nations and quarters of the globe, the basic elements of human nature themselves would seem more numerous.” He predicted that “when every one was developing in his individuality, more varied and finer modifications of the beautiful human character would spring up, and one-sidedness would become more rare.”82 Mill articulated a similar vision of human progress. He asked his readers: “What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture.… Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development.”83 These statements serve to highlight the teleological assumptions embedded in Humboldt’s and Mill’s notions of social progress. Both men hinted that the human race would tend naturally towards moral perfection, given the requisite conditions of freedom and diversity. Mill’s reluctance to surrender that belief helps to explain his critical admiration for the progressive visions of history expounded by SaintSimon and Comte as well as his praise for the historian Guizot, whom he credited with elaborating a theory of “a progressive unfolding of the capabilities of humanity,” which was directed towards “a destination, as it were.”84 To be sure, neither Mill nor Humboldt went so far as to

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argue that history was destined to follow a fixed path. Both subscribed to a looser idea of social progress that was patterned after their understanding of organic growth. Rather than conceiving of society as a preformed germ, they envisioned it as an organism that was propelled by certain goal-directed drives whose expression was conditioned by external factors. Yet even this less rigidly teleological understanding of social change is likely to strike today’s reader as distinctly old-fashioned. It carries about it a whiff of the eighteenth century. This is due in no small part, I think, to the fact that the model of the organism on which Humboldt and Mill based their political and social theories has been largely deprived of its teleological underpinnings by modern science. Writing over two decades ago, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr confidently proclaimed that his discipline had been “purified through the elimination of vitalistic and finalistic connotations,” such that “it is fair to say that for biologists, vitalism has been a dead issue for more than fifty years.”85 Across the life sciences, the vitalist notion of goal-directed forces appears to have yielded to the hazy concept of “emergence.” According to Paul Davies, that concept suggests that “in physical systems the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. That is to say, at each level of complexity, new and often surprising qualities emerge that cannot, at least in any straightforward manner, be attributed to known properties of the constituents.”86 But in a crucial departure, emergence theories stop short of suggesting that an organism’s functions are the product of a goal-directed impulse or plan. Researchers tend to assume that “emergent properties” like consciousness are entirely the result of mechanical causes, albeit ones that are not yet fully understood. The case of Humboldt and Mill, however, raises the possibility that the social sciences have not been entirely purged of teleological assumptions. Few people would debate that Humboldt’s and Mill’s political and social theories are foundational to modern liberalism. If one accepts my argument that those theories relied heavily on the model of the vital organism, then the notion of goal-directed forces that is implicit in that model would seem to continue to inform the modern faith in democracy and the free market economy. Have we really given up the Humboldtian belief that if restraints on people are lifted and conditions are created in which they can fully express themselves, progress will naturally ensue? That idea would have been fully compatible with the outlook of a vitalist researcher of the late eighteenth century.

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1 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 33: 261. 2 Jerome David Levin, Theories of the Self (Washington, DC: Hemisphere Publishing, 1992), 10. 3 For a good historical overview of eighteenth-century vitalism, see Theodore M. Brown, “From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, no. 2 (1974): 179–216; Roy Porter, ed., Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 4 Peter Hanns Reill, “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994): 345–66. Reill wrote that Humboldt “read the major works of Enlightenment vitalism assiduously, and was a close friend and discussant of some of its leaders, especially Blumenbach, Sömmerring, Johann Reil, and Georg Forster. Obviously, he learned a great deal from his brother Alexander and discussed these issues with others of similar mind such as Marcus Herz, Goethe, and Schiller. In his numerous travels, Humboldt always visited the leading scientific thinkers of the area, exchanging views about their latest discoveries” (354–5). See also Paul R. Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 1:136–40. 5 Peter Hanns Reill, “Eighteenth-Century Uses of Vitalism in Constructing the Human Sciences,” in Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, ed. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61–87; citing 61. 6 For more on the manifold influences on Humboldt’s idea of the self, see J.W. Burrow, introduction to The Limits of State Action by Wilhelm von Humboldt (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1993); Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 343–51; David Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 1 (1983): 55–73; and Brian Vick, “Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (2002): 483–500.

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7 Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. J.W. Burrow, 72; see Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Albert Leitzmann, 1:17 (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903–36, reprinted Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 166. 8 In a December 1791 letter to Gentz outlining the plan of the treatise, Humboldt stated that “all human energy originates in Sinnlichkeit”; see Politische Jugendbriefe Wilhelm von Humboldts an Gentz, ed. Albert Leitzmann, 51, quoted by Christina M. Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufklärung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 335. Translation is mine. 9 Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1:109. 10 Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Riskin coined the term “sentimental empiricism” to describe the conflation of the sensual and moral realms in the minds of many eighteenth-century French naturalists. 11 Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufklärung, 345–6. Translation is mine. 12 Ibid., 336, 346. 13 Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 14 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 71; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:165. 15 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 71; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:165. 16 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 12–13; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:108–9. 17 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 299. Seigel argued that the “expressivist” idea of the self first emerged in Enlightenment Germany, where it was championed by Leibniz and later by Herder, Goethe, and Humboldt. For more on Goethe’s idea of the self, see Vernon Pratt and Isis Brook, “Goethe’s Archetype and the Romantic Concept of the Self,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27, no. 3 (1996): 351–65. 18 Research indicates that Humboldt’s understanding of organic growth as a moral ascension derived not only from his study of Platonic philosophy but also from Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants (Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären), 1790. Goethe’s study, which appeared just one year before Humboldt’s composition of The Limits of State Action, described precisely the sort of progression of the spiritual out of the material to which Humboldt alluded in his treatise. 19 Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufklärung, 352–3; 346–7. Translation is mine. 20 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 78; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:174. 21 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 79; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:174.

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22 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 58; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:152. 23 See chap. 5, “Was Marat a Vitalist?” 24 In his introduction to Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Limits of State Action, Burrow argued that the image of the organism presented Humboldt with certain “disadvantages,” the most serious being that unlike selves, organisms “were self-determining, but not consciously self-determining” (xxvii). Don A. Habibi made a similar observation in John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth (Boston: Kluwer, 2001), 28–9. 25 Malte Stein, “‘Frauen-Schönheit will nichts heißen’: Ansichten zum Eros als Bildungstrieb bei Winckelmann, Wilhelm von Humboldt und Goethe,” in Klassik und Anti-Klassik: Goethe und seine Epoche, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr and Harro Segeberg (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2001), 195–218. 26 Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, 137. 27 Ibid., 177. 28 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 343. 29 For more on “expanded mechanism,” see Charles T. Wolfe and Motoichi Terada, “The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism,” Science in Context 21, no. 4 (2008): 537–79, esp. 551–61. Wolfe and Terada assert that the effort to reconcile mechanical models with some of the vitalists’ central insights began in the eighteenth century among some of the Montpellier physicians. 30 Anna Jean Mill, ed., John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), xxiii. 31 Nicholas R. Pearce, “John Stuart Mill’s Botanical Collections from Greece (a Private Passion),” Phytologia Balcanica 12, no. 2 (2006): 149–64; citing 149. 32 Ibid., 151. 33 Henry Trimon, “His Botanical Studies” in John Stuart Mill: His Life and Works – Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 43–8; citing 47. 34 Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, 59. 35 For a good overview of Montpellier vitalism, see Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (London: Ashgate, 2003). 36 Jean-Michel Provençal and Alexander von Humboldt, “Recherches sur la respiration des poissons,” Mémoires de Physique et de Chimie de la Société d’Arcueil 2 (1808): 339–404. See Provençal’s Questions de chirurgie, proposées par MM. Ch. Louis Dumas (Montpellier, 1811) for evidence of his medical vitalism. For more on Provençal and his relationship with A. v. Humboldt, see Maurice Crosland, The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 143, 379–80.

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

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Mill, John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France, 85. Ibid. Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, 167. Mill, A System of Logic, bk. 3, ch. 6, §1, quoted in Paul C.W. Davies, preface to The Reemergence of Emergence: The Emergence Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), x. Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, 50–1. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 147. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, vol. 18 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill – Essays on Politics and Society Part I (On Liberty), 263. Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 283. See Habibi, John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth, ch. 2. Mill, On Liberty, 263. Andrew Valls, “Self-Development and the Liberal State: The Cases of John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt,” Review of Politics 61, no. 2 (1999): 251–74. Valls argues that Humboldt posited an “open-ended” kind of Bildung that “can occur in almost any environment and can manifest itself in almost any way of life.” In contrast, Mill articulated “a more substantive view of self-development” that put greater weight on “the exercise of one’s higher faculties of reasoning and of sentiment,” with the result that Mill’s ideal served to “limit the sort of life-styles of which he would approve.” I think that Valls exaggerates the differences between the two thinkers. Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung aimed at the cultivation of the higher faculties no less than Mill’s. The difference lies in the fact that Humboldt was more explicit in his suggestion that the means of self-development necessarily varied depending on a person’s level of culture and education. I argue that Mill, like Humboldt, understood self-development as a gradual ascent to ever more rarified heights of thinking and feeling. Because both men regarded this ascent as limitless, they shared the belief that Bildung was an “open-ended” process. Mill, On Liberty, 267. Mill, Autobiography and Collected Essays, 147. For Mill’s praise of Harriet Taylor, see ibid., 195. For Humboldt’s quote, see Limits of State Action, 18; Gesammelte Schriften, 1:17, 113. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), §64, cited in Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231–58; citing 234. See ibid.

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55 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 68; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:163. 56 Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of SelfFormation.” 57 See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (1861); ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), in Collected Works, 33. 58 Mill, On Liberty, 224. 59 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 31; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:126. 60 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 80; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:176. 61 Mill, On Liberty, 272. 62 Ibid., 272. 63 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 18; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:113. 64 Ibid., 113–14. 65 Mill, On Liberty, 265. 66 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 5; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:101. 67 Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufklärung, 335. 68 Ibid., 335. Sauter explained that for Humboldt, “energy requires stimulation from outside in order to express itself, and the more various these stimuli, the more nuanced is the energy [that] unfolds and manifests itself in all its richness.” Translation is mine. 69 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 140; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:237. 70 Mill, On Liberty, 270. 71 See, e.g., Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1:2, 111. 72 Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of SelfFormation,” 62, 63. 73 Mill, On Liberty, 293. 74 Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, 453. 75 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 465. 76 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17. 77 Beiser asserted that Humboldt and his German contemporaries believed that “social life should exist for the sake of the individual, not the individual for the sake of social life” (ibid., 17). 78 Humboldt first discovered this organic idea of the nation in the writings of Montesquieu and Herder, the latter of whom compared the world to a “great garden in which peoples grew up like plants”; see Johann Gottfried von Herder, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–7) in Johann Gottfried von Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 395.

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79 Jean-Joseph Ménuret de Chambaud, Encyclopédie XI (1765), 319a, quoted by Wolfe and Terada, “The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism,” 537. 80 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 11; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:107. 81 Mill, On Liberty, 266. 82 Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 32–3; see Gesammelte Schriften, 1:127–8. 83 Mill, On Liberty, 274. 84 Mill, “Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History” (1845) in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical (London: J.W. Parker, 1859), 129, quoted in Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 123. 85 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 64, 52. 86 Davies, preface to The Reemergence of Emergence, x.

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PART THREE ESOTERICISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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chapter seven

Constructs of Life Forms in Lavater’s Physiognomy ANNETTE GRACZYK

The Zurich theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, a pastor at Zurich’s Waisenhauskirche, had already made a name for himself before he published his Physiognomische Fragmente in four folios between 1775 and 1778.1 Earlier publications had introduced him as a theological writer whose work was characterized by an esoteric bent.2 His 1772 programmatic essay, Von der Physiognomik, prepared the ground for his monumental Physiognomische Fragmente, in which he developed the results of his studies in great detail.3 The work was translated into several languages, including Dutch, French, and English, popularized Lavater’s ideas, rehabilitated physiognomic concepts, and exerted a lasting influence on European Enlightenment thought.

Lavater’s Departure from Earlier Physiognomy Lavater’s work forced Enlightenment thinkers to take physiognomy seriously. As a field of scholarship, physiognomy had been compromised by its affinities with magic, its intersection with astrology (such as its interpretation of forehead lines), and its speculative aspects, such as its predictions of good luck and misfortune. In 1765, the article “Physionomie,” by Louis de Jaucourt, which appeared in the twelfth volume of the Encyclopédie, categorized the art of inferring the character of a person from their facial features as an unacceptable pseudo-science, a scienc[e] imagin[aire]. The form of the nose, mouth, and other facial characteristics, de Jaucourt argued, contributed as little to the “naturel” of a person as the size or thickness of their limbs influenced their thinking. The ambitions of physiognomy, he continued, were laughable. And yet, there had been attempts throughout the ages to elevate this “form of prejudice” to the status of a “divinatory science.”4

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Thus, while the Encyclopédie dismissed physiognomy summarily, Lavater set out to provide a rational foundation on which centuries of reflection on the disputed field of physiognomy could be recast in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. The position taken by the French encyclopedia certainly did not reflect popular opinion at the time. Old forms of physiognomic thought, associated with magic, continued to exercise influence in the eighteenth century. In 1741, Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon had listed three subcategories of physiognomy: “metoposcopy, which concerns the forehead; chiromancy, which deals with the lines on the hand;” and “podoscopy, which considers the feet.”5 Christian Adam Peuschel, meanwhile, had included Zedler’s first two categories as central in his Abhandlung von der Physiognomie, Metoposcopie und Chiromantie, published in 1769. In the subtitle of his Abhandlung, Peuschel promises to substantiate “in detail the certainty of prophesies based on the face, the forehead and the hands.”6 This textbook represented, for the most part, a compilation of physiognomic perspectives culled from the previous century, such as signatures and astrology. He traces, for example, the art of reading the lines on a person’s forehead back to the “ancient Greeks,” who “undoubtedly had Hermes or Mercury [Trismegistos] to thank.”7 Peuschel himself distinguishes among seven major lines on the human forehead, which he identifies as marking the influence of the six planets and the sun and thus links to the corresponding planetary signs. These lines, he argues, can form both auspicious signs, such as circles, stars, triangles, or cubes, which all have “regular proportions,” or, as a result of curvilinear intersections, inauspicious, irregular cruciform figures.8 The latter, he argues, mean “that the person concerned should fear hanging or beheading as the consequence of his evil life.”9 In the case of the hand, Peuschel distinguishes among a “lifeline;” four further lines that reflect the state of the inner organs, such as the “intestinal line” and the “liver, lung and stomach line;” as well as striations such as the “matrimony line” and the “decision line.”10 Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente both built on yet departed from Peuschel’s earlier work. Like Peuschel, Lavater focuses on the forehead, which, as the “temple of the intellect,” he regards as particularly significant, and he, too, regards the hands as physiognomically informative. He shows no interest, however, in the so-called planetary lines or lifeline – i.e., the striations and grooves that Peuschel sees as indicative of the fateful influence of celestial bodies. In contrast, Lavater focuses on the forehead and hands as organic forms of expression of an individual constitution, personality, and intellectual strength. For instance, in the case of the

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forehead, he is interested in how its contours may indicate personal intelligence or stupidity. Similarly, he uses the outline and appearance of the hand not to diagnose the activities of vital internal organs such as the bowels and stomach, but rather to ascertain constitutive characteristics such as “cloddishness” or “feebleness.”11 Lavater decisively distinguished his physiognomy from the work of his predecessors in the field, taking pains to disassociate it from magic. “I do not teach a black art,” he insisted, “an arcanum that I would have wanted to keep for myself.… I teach only … in a … science that is the most general, the most obvious, … and part of every individual.”12 As early as his 1772 essay, Von der Physiognomik, Lavater had dismissed physiognomic predictions of individual destinies à la Peuschel as “charlatanism and empty musings,” and he wanted to see such approaches banned from the “realm of the true sciences.”13 Nonetheless, he remained committed to a number of the central doctrines of the old physiognomy and leaned towards models deriving from recent esoteric thought, which he deemed compatible with his Christian convictions. Lavater synthesized old and new physiognomic ideas in other ways, too. Although he occasionally employed the model of the four temperaments associated with the humoral doctrine of bodily fluids, his physiognomy, which he understood as the “interpretation of forces” or as a “science of the [corporal] signs of forces,”14 aimed to move decisively beyond the narrow schematization of his predecessors. He recognized, however, the tradition’s doctrines of types and signatures as important forerunners of his own work as such doctrines had helped formulate a language suited to identifying characteristic traits. Hence, at the end of the fourth volume of Physiognomische Fragmente, he highlights Jacob Böhme’s contribution in this respect, yet formulates a startlingly new approach, using a far more flexible terminology, that enables him to identify and analyse a greater spectrum of character variants and more complex characters. Instead of compressing the human phenotype into rigid individual types, as in antiquity, Lavater divides it into a differentiated system of curves and lines, as well as individual segments such as the forehead, nose, and mouth, that combine to express inner dispositions and moral forces, which together produce the overall character of an individual.15 Lavater understands physiognomies to be the result of different and, in many cases, tiny deviations in the body’s morphological features. Although he describes character physiognomies in polar opposition to one another, his system of dynamic gradations allows for fluid transitions.

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Lavater’s scientific approach involved the attempt to identify fixed physical-morphological equivalents for aspects of human character. This plan forced him to narrow the foci of his investigation and play down the role of social-cultural relations in the formation of character. He thus necessarily identified, above all, constant, fixed features of the body, particularly of the face and cranium, as relevant in physiognomic terms and made bone structure (as the basis of facial formation) the foundation of his physiognomy. Because he wanted to identify fixed character traits, he was also compelled to regard the character of the individual as largely bereft of dynamism – in other words, as a relatively fixed entity. The identification of character through fixed criteria, however, presumed a constancy of character, even an ontologization of the character of the individual. In this way, Lavater was at odds with the social optimism of the Enlightenment, which emphasized the individual’s capacity and preparedness to learn.

Lavater’s Picture Archive Lavater’s enterprise was supported by a large physiognomic picture archive that he had established in his Zurich apartment, which consisted of prints, drawings, and paintings. In the process of completing his work, Lavater collaborated with numerous painters and engravers to round off his collection; for the book edition, all the painted depictions had to be redrawn and engraved. The most important contributors included Daniel Chodowiecki; the young Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Lips, who had begun his career with Lavater; and Johann Rudolf von Schellenberg, from Winterthur. The collection comprised both contemporary works and portraits by painters from different epochs, which depicted historical as well as mythical and religious figures. Lavater commissioned portraits of living contemporaries but also included non-commissioned portraits sent to him by other contemporaries. One result of his methodology was that his Physiognomische Fragmente became a collaborative work in progress. He wrote commentaries on this rich array of material, arranged it into general categories and didactic series, and ensured that the series was complete. The author also recommended that physiognomists create and install in special cabinets plaster casts of heads and individual body parts, such as mouths.16 Whereas the study of physiognomic features had previously been limited to portraits and sculptures primarily found in art museums, accurate plaster casts of living people were now made available for

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a broader and more scientific approach. Lavater’s immediate model in this respect may well have been the medical moulages produced in the eighteenth century for scientific study, rather than death masks and reproductions of sculptures from antiquity. He also recommended that the physiognomist should include “plaster casts of medals with old and new heads” in his collection.17 Portraits, outline drawings, and silhouettes occupy a particularly important place in Lavater’s pictorial atlas.18 In this sense, Lavater’s project is a striking illustration of the decisive role of the image as a medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Also, his interpretation of pictorial examples was often naive; for example, in many cases, he drew on knowledge from personal encounters with the human subjects he was characterizing. This use of anecdotal evidence raises the question as to whether Lavater was merely drawing on what he already knew when deciphering these portraits and, in general, whether a picture or outline can, in fact, adequately characterize the subject portrayed. In a pragmatic sense, the presentation of a person in a pictorial atlas is merely a visual abbreviation. Lavater wanted to systematize these abbreviations and, aided by written identification and analysis of indicators and interconnections, transform them into a scholarly discipline. To this end, Lavater relied above all on analytical diagrams in which the faces were divided into distinctive parts: forehead, nose, mouth, and chin. Lavater regarded these features as the seat of different forces and dispositions: his physiognomic topographies became expressions of the inner person. Through these graphical forms, the expression of human character is transformed into a pictorial semiotics that can be read and deciphered. Lavater thus transformed the image into a series of formalized contours and lines: a signalement. Furthermore, Lavater concentrated on those lines and angles that he regarded as most expressive. He dissected them into small, (supposedly) meaningful segments and attributed to them corresponding intellectual and moral qualities. In keeping with his goal of elevating physiognomy to the status of a science, he emphasized the measurability of gaps and angles among the individual organs, such as those between the eyes and among the forehead, nose, mouth, and chin in profile (Figure 7.1). Angles were also loaded with meaning. The measurability of human contours was crucial, in Lavater’s view, to making his classificatory system an exact science. He even developed special measuring devices, most notably a special tape for measuring the forehead. In his view, the measurable lines and curves of the face were akin, as he writes, to the

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Figure 7.1 Johann Caspar Lavater, profile line of the foreheads of “very intelligent and thoughtful minds” in relation to lower parts, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 4, 44.

elliptical orbits of Newton’s astrophysics. His immodest reference to Newton says a great deal: just as Newton had rendered planetary orbits in geometrical and mathematical terms, so Lavater would render the expression of human character in geometrical and mathematical terms in order to establish physiognomy as a modern science. Lavater’s tableaux and classificatory tables are designed along the lines of a morphologically comparative anatomy and intended to be tools of controlled comparison. They include combinations of faces with striking features, outlines, and profile views in silhouette as well as comparative inventories of individual parts of the face, such as foreheads, noses, eyes, and mouths. Individual curving lines (e.g., of foreheads and mouths), relative distances (e.g., between the eyes), and facial angles are also variants in the identification of types of character. Although Lavater researches the expression of character in the tiniest of details, he presumes that the reference to the whole is always retained. For him, the different parts of the body represent the character of an individual as a whole.

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Lavater accentuated his physiognomic classifications by directly juxtaposing features supposedly indicative of extreme predispositions, such as idiocy and genius. To ensure that he was actually showing examples of feeble-mindedness, he used “madhouse” inmates as his objects of study, as he explained in Von der Physiognomik. As examples of genius, he used famous scientists, including Newton, Haller, and Boerhaave; philosophers such as Plato; writers like Pope, Homer, Klopstock, and Swift; and reformers, including Zwingli and Calvin. Lavater believed that these figures exemplified intelligence, creativity, and integrity, as evidenced by both their works and their reputations. Lavater also created a conceptual terminology for his interpretations of portraits and various analytical tableaux. While his intention was to empirically apply his physiognomic principles to concrete individuals, he nevertheless had to develop a supra-individual system of scientific interpretation. One aspect of the conceptual terminology he developed was a set of everyday descriptions, such as “intelligent and refined,” “intelligent and coarse,” and “feeble,” as specific analytic terms. In his search for an appropriate nomenclature for his pictorial or graphical-analytical comparative series, he consulted various dictionaries, general works on ethics, and philosophical writings.19 “I have already compiled over 400 names for faces of all types, but this is far from enough,” he writes in the fourth volume of Physiognomische Fragmente. He advises beginners in the field of physiognomy to find a “general, characteristic name” for each face and carefully examine its accuracy. “You should record every nomenclatural nuance that occurs to you. But before you draw the basic form of the face and provide a detailed description of its character – check seven times that you are not mixing one with the other.”20 Lavater’s main categories include “physical state; emotional state; moral character [and] immorality.” To these he adds “sensibility; strength; humor; intelligence; taste; religion; imperfection” and, as social categories, “regional faces; class faces; official faces [and] artisan faces.”21 Categories such as “intellect” and “heart” are included in a wide spectrum of finely graduated individual designations. These extend from maximum values such as “advanced astuteness” and “genius” to intermediate values such as “mediocre intelligence” and “varying abilities” and ultimately to extreme opposites such as “foolishness, irrationality, madness.”22 Lavater’s nomenclature intentionally avoids scientific abstraction and remains linked with everyday language. On the one hand, at a terminological level, his physiognomy does not reflect the scientific character with which he intended to imbue it. On the other hand, his nomenclature is

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all the more suitable to everyday applications. Lavater lauded his system as a form of knowledge that could be applied to highly diverse areas of life: from social interaction and the choice of partners to the exercise of state authority and policing. His physiognomy, he writes, could be employed by a judge to quickly and reliably categorize a criminal, thereby – in Lavater’s crude version of Enlightenment optimism – obviating the need for torture as a means of uncovering the truth.

Physiognomy as Decryption of the Divine Language of Nature Lavater founded his physiognomy as a semiotics of organic, expressive forms on his understanding of nature as God’s second revelation. For Lavater, physico-theology formed the philosophical background for his physiognomic analysis as a means of glorifying God. He also understood his work to be a hermeneutics of nature that was oriented to intelligibility and continuity within the framework of natural revelation. Physicotheology linked precise observation, measurement, and the scientific analysis of nature with a form of worship that aimed to both venerate and fathom God’s wisdom, as expressed in the wonders of his works. The mathematical formalization of nature was thus linked to religious contemplation, while at the same time assuming that God had created a rational law-governed nature, devoid of discontinuities, with a purposive teleology. In the preface to the first volume of Physiognomische Fragmente, Lavater explains his intentions with an air of both theological and scientific modesty. I do not promise (for promising such would be foolish and nonsensical) to deliver the thousand-character alphabet required to decipher the instinctive language of nature in the countenance and the entire external appearance of the human being or even merely the beauties and perfections of the human face; but only to sketch several of the letters of this divine alphabet so legibly that every healthy eye will be able to find and recognize the same wherever confronted with them.23

Lavater does not want to comprehend the human being within a planar, mechanical worldliness; rather, as a theologian, he seeks to retain the individual’s dignity as a complex unity of body and soul. A creationist and theological hermeneutics of nature is central here, one in which the human being remains essentially determined by the fact of being created

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in the image of God. As a distinguished being within the framework of Creation, the human being is ennobled but also normatively obligated in the sense that he must morally retain his ontological status. Thus, Lavater cannot pursue his physiognomy as a purely objective science; his approach is shaped by his faith and its moral and aesthetic implications, and physiognomy is, for him, a way of recognizing and serving God. Lavater comprehends the phenotypic and, in the narrow sense, physiognomic specificities of the human being as a natural sign system given to people by God. For Lavater, the physiognomic expression is disposed to a communicative transparency; therefore, it can in principle be decoded and read. This quest distinguishes Lavater’s work from the cryptically coded messages of the earlier doctrine of signatures. His aspiration to discern this postulated transparency favours a pictorial type conducive to it – namely, the outline drawing and the profile drawing in silhouette. Both lack contexts and therefore also lack the potential for relativization. Moreover, both adhere to contours prescribed by the bone structure such that the formation of the face and cranium are revealed in their main lines.

The Continuum of Body and Soul and the Dynamic-Gradualist Chain of Being In spite of his critique of the old physiognomy, Lavater shared an important assumption with Peuschel as well as Renaissance and even ancient physiognomy: the concept that the emotional disposition (das Gemüt) and character of the invisible soul could be discerned in the form of the body and its individual features. According to the ancient pseudoAristotelian Physiognomika, the interior state is reflected in the external form of the human being because there is a correspondence between the soul and the body. The physician Giambattista della Porta’s physiognomic work, written at the end of the sixteenth century, begins with a chapter on the “alliance … of the body with the emotional state or soul.”24 Leibniz also provided physiognomy with a weighty philosophical theory in his Monadology, in which he describes the body as a “reflection of a soul that represents the entire universe in microcosm.”25 In the eighteenth century, the body-soul problem was framed as, above all, the relationship of the physical to the moral human being. In this context, physiognomy attracted the interest of significant philosophers and scholars such as Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff (whom Lavater cites in his physiognomy as a theoretical source), Johann Jakob Bodmer,

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and – from Lavater’s circle – the physician Johann Georg Zimmermann, a student of Albrecht von Haller’s.26 The point of departure for Lavater’s physiognomy is the thesis that body and soul have a “precise, immediate association,” even a causal connection, with one another. For him, the “exterior” – i.e., the perceptible – physical appearance is the “surface” of an invisible “interior”; the exterior is “nothing more than the ending, the boundary of the interior,” just as, conversely, the interior is only “a direct continuation of the exterior.”27 Lavater thereby goes beyond a mere correspondence between soul and body, as philosophically understood by pre-stabilist interpretations. The relationship between body and soul in Lavater’s work, although not always free of contradiction, is in principle defined as a continuum. Indeed, for Lavater, physical signs can be read as expressions of intellectual and moral qualities because he regards the human body as a manifestation of the soul. For him, the soul has a holistic relationship with the body, yet is not identical with it and remains invisible and transcendent. Through the soul, the human being participates, as it were, in the divine light and is integrated into God’s plan. For Lavater the theologian, body and soul cannot coincide because the mortal body and the immortal soul cannot be one. For Christian thinkers like Lavater, the body-soul problem results from the fact that human individuality must be simultaneously positioned within mortality and immortality and, thus, also within history and salvation history. For Lavater and many of his contemporaries, the ideal model of a hierarchical-gradualist scale of nature formulated by the Swiss biologist and naturalist Charles Bonnet offered a solution to the body-soul problem. Bonnet’s scala naturae could be elaborated in a Creation analogy – beyond the human being – that envisioned continually higher steps leading to heavenly entities. In this sense, the scala naturae could also be linked with Bonnet’s concept of an ongoing development of human beings, who aspire, in this world and the next, to a perfection realized in salvation and immortality. Bonnet had formulated this idea in 1769 in his Idées sur l’état futur des êtres vivants, ou Palingénésie philosophique, parts of which Lavater translated into German and published in Zurich in 1771, and this is probably why Lavater praises the Swiss naturalist so highly in his Physiognomische Fragmente. Bonnet’s gradualist model – according to which nature organizes and optimizes itself in ever more perfect works – allows Lavater to assume different stages of perfection already reached by human beings in this world in anticipation of their future spiritual perfection in the next world:

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human aspirations to greater perfection in this life go along with growth of the sublime, spiritual body. The more Lavater proceeded from the model of a gradualist process of perfection, the more he found himself at odds with his initial view of physiognomy. The entelechy demanded by the divine plan – the progress towards and ultimate realization of perfection – cannot be aligned with Lavater’s morphologically oriented commitment to essentialist physiological features because these assume a largely static character. This contradiction is present throughout Lavater’s physiognomic work. Moreover, as a theologian, Lavater felt obligated to retain a place for the future redemptive work of Christ. He therefore opposes the life of the mind to that of the flesh, which is linked with vice and sexuality. In a related idea, he opposes beauty and harmonic proportions to ugliness, malformation, and disproportion. By linking beauty and virtue on the one hand, and ugliness and vice on the other, Lavater combines social with salvation-historical distinctions. In the tradition of representations of Christ, Lavater sought the consummate salvation-physiognomy.28 In this regard, Lavater was also influenced by Swedenborg’s physiognomic language of heaven. His interest in Swedenborg’s ideas is evident in the sixteenth letter of his Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, which he wrote in 1772, the year in which his initial reflections on physiognomy were published. For Lavater, Christ is the “most consummate image of the invisible God” and therefore the “most expressive and vivid” embodiment of this physiognomic language of heaven. This language was related to the first “nature language” of humanity in Paradise before the Fall, which, due to its richness and, above all, its direct reference to the essence of things, was far superior to later conceptual-analytic languages. As creatures made in the “image of God and Christ,” human beings retained in their physiognomies remnants of this nature language, which reveals the true essence of being. For Lavater, the physiognomic nature language is a synesthetic language shaped by musicality and synchrony. Just as the physiognomy of Christ can never be comprehended in its richness and sublimity by words – even those of the highest archangel – so, on a small scale, each human being is a “simultaneous, multifaceted, inexhaustible expression unreachable with words; he is completely nature language.”29 For the physiognomist who understands this nature language of the body, not only the “eloquent eyes” but also every finger and every muscle are part of an “all-meaning language”: a “representation of the invisible” in the form of a “revelation and language of truth.”30 In heaven, according to Lavater, not only “every point” of our natural body but also every point

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of our “transfigured body will be a sheer all-meaning and completely intelligible expression and language of truth.”31 Because Lavater assumed a unity in which body ascended to spirit, he saw the physical aspects of the physiognomy of the human being as being absorbed into an eschatological physiognomy. To the ideal physiognomist, equipped with the gift of prophecy, the human being appears not only in his earthly character but also, simultaneously, in the “‘unconcealedness’ … of the future world.”32 Lavater’s physiognomy can thus be read as simultaneously historical and salvation-historical. This being so, the question of why he should have founded his system on a largely static concept of traits, one that seems to completely exclude any entelechy in principle, becomes even more germane, not to mention puzzling. This inherent contradiction also begs the question of how he intended to capture in reductionist schemata the divine gift of the boundless physiognomic expression of being. Lavater’s religious ideas and associated aesthetic concepts contradict his intention to distinguish his physiognomy from that of his predecessors by establishing an empirically fixed system of traits. Within the framework of his approach as outlined so far, these religious-aesthetic ideas are also at odds with the dynamic notion of character as a tense mixture of dispositions and forces that was part of eighteenth-century discourse. By introducing several modifications to his model, however, Lavater was ultimately able to integrate this more dynamic viewpoint.

Life Force, Holism, and Monadism Drawing on Bonnet’s work, Lavater bases his physiognomy on the central idea that living entities are determined by a unitary form of organization, which is, in turn, determined by the life force that conditions it. In all its forms of organization, nature operates from within; outwards from a central point across all that surrounds it. The same life force that makes the heart beat moves the finger. The same force curves the cranium and the nail on the smallest toe.33

In producing the overall organization of the body, this invisible life force also creates a coherent, holistic expression of that body. The life force generates both the human phenotype and, simultaneously, the unique, individual human form. Lavater assumes that, in consequence, the overall form of organization, in both its species-specific and its individual aspects, manifests itself holistically in the smallest detail of the body. As

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he writes in the fourth volume of Physiognomische Fragmente, “Every part of an organic whole is an image of the whole.…” Because each element has a precise “relationship” to the body “of which it is a part,” “the length of the smallest limb, of the smallest joint in a finger can reveal the proportions of the whole, [i.e.,] the length and breadth of the body.”34 Lavater’s holism leads him to posit a convergence of phenotype, individual form, and individual character that does not allow for deviations and that, therefore, necessarily evaluates physical deformation as moral deviation. Lavater does not associate disfiguration with physical suffering, but rather sees it as something akin to a satanic monstrosity. The Göttingen physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was a hunchback, must have felt insulted by Lavater’s discriminatory theory equating physical with moral deformity. His pamphlet, “Über die Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen” is regarded as one of the most trenchant critiques of Lavater’s work by a contemporary.35 Lavater, however, believed that his holistic approach could be supported by insights from contemporary anatomy. Just as the master anatomists of his time were able to reconstruct the skeleton of an individual body from a heap of unordered bones, so too, he believed, could a superior physiologically trained physiognomist, who had access, as it were, to the gaze of the angels, “calculate” from a “single joint or muscle the entire external form” and “the whole character.”36 Lavater’s vision of future physiognomy was, in a certain sense, decades ahead of the natural sciences of his time. In 1800, without presuming to have access to the realm of the angels, Georges Cuvier, working in the field of paleontological morphology, would claim to be able to reconstruct the entire forms of extinct animal species based on small pieces of organic evidence, such as teeth.37 Within the framework of his overall physiognomic approach, however, Lavater was concerned with more than morphological structure and phenotype. Not only the physicality of the human being but also the character that it expressed co-determined that it could, according to Lavater, be holistically accessed using physiognomic micro-elements. A further consequence of Lavater’s holistic, organological approach is his emphasis on an extreme homogeneity and cohesiveness of form. “Everything is elongated when the head is. Everything is round when the [head] is.” Everything is, as it were, of a piece. This precept applies to the stature; to the “color, hair, skin, arteries, nerves, bones”; to the “voice, gait and behavior”; and to the “style” and “passion.”38 In keeping with these assumptions and because the hands have a particular significance for Lavater, he also sees handwriting as a graphical expression of the individual character.

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In spite of his references to biological, medical-physiological, and anatomical discourses on the body and its organization, for Lavater the human soul is superordinate, operating above or behind the organic life force. He no longer comprehends it as a unitary “simple substance,” however, but as a force composed of different elements that together form the “invisible, dominant, animating part of my nature.”39 While the power of thought can be localized in the forehead and the power of the will in the heart, the vital force operates throughout the body. Yet the organic life force is concentrated particularly in the hands and the mouth. Lavater’s notion of his physiognomy as the “interpretation of forces” includes both the higher moral and the vital forces. This duality suggests the potential for a dynamic interplay of contradictory forces that, for example, can be read in the face. When analysing concrete cases, Lavater is forced to address the possibility of contradictory tendencies in the expression of character. And the more he finds it necessary in the course of his studies to comprehend character as a complex interplay of forces, the more his idea of a holistically coherent character is subverted. He attempts to evade these consequences not as a scientist, but instead with the help of contemporary theology. To this end, Lavater anchored the relationship between moral and vital forces in a superordinate model of monadic perspectivity, at least in the beginning of his project. Thus, in 1772, in his programmatic essay Von der Physiognomik, he writes: Every modification of my body has a certain relationship to the soul. A hand different to the one I have would require a quite different proportion of all parts of my body; that means that my soul would have to see the world from a quite different perspective, from a different angle; and then I would be a quite different person.40

For the early Lavater, not only the individual organ and the entire body but also the individual organ and the soul are linked in an overall, holistic context. Hence, he writes, “The fact that I thus have such a hand and no other also reveals that I have a certain soul; and this extends to every muscle, indeed, every fiber.”41 Here Lavater assumes that every aspect of the human body, down to its tiniest detail, is significant. He also implies that one can make statements based on these tiny bearers of meaning that extend beyond emotional and physical life and address the (metaphysical) soul and its monadic-perspectival condition. In an overall sense, although Lavater wants to organize physiognomy on the basis of empirical evidence and reason – as opposed to around

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lines of astrological influences or prophetic prefiguration – his approach is contradictory. On the one hand, he draws on contemporary scientific constructs of the organic and the life force insofar as he comprehends the physiognomic “total impression” as an expression of inner dispositions, desires, and forces. But on the other hand, as a theologian, he interprets the organic as a self-evident dimension of the spiritual human being. This disjuncture exposes him to the influence of esoteric concepts such as the chain of being, the continuum of body and soul, the sublime body, and Swedenborg’s language of heaven and monadism. Drawing on these ideas and the notion that the scala naturae extends beyond the material world and into the immaterial-sublime, Lavater attempts to maintain the telos of an overarching salvation-historical development.

From the Frog to the Angel: Lavater’s Modified Chain of Being Lavater introduces the first volume of his Physiognomische Fragmente with an unusually long quotation from Johann Gottfried Herder’s Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts. He uses this passage to comment on Herder’s theological exegesis of the Creation account in the First Book of Moses. Lavater quotes the passage in which Herder emphatically celebrates the creation of the human being. Lavater regards Genesis as a sublime legacy passed on to humanity because it proclaims that God created the human being in his own image. In his physiognomy, Lavater uses lyrical prose and poetic inserts to celebrate the human likeness of God as holistic beings, brothers, fellow creations, and partakers in future immortality. Yet, in accordance with anatomical models, he also distinguishes between the smallest expressive particles of character as all but deterministically defining the individual. Intent on maintaining the postulate of humanity’s likeness to God and faced with empirical human diversity, Lavater could hardly infer a God that was, in principle, infinitely variable. He solved this conceptual dilemma by drawing on contemporary discussions; he traced the manifold form of the human being back to a prototype, a genus-specific, physiognomic ur-form, which he believed incorporated the likeness of God in a pure form. He saw this hypostasized human ur-form as also being characterized by specific geometric points and angles. In his view, he could interpret and describe the physiognomic groups and individual physiognomies identifiable in his epoch as modifications of this prototype.

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For Lavater, the likeness to God vouches for the special dignity of the human being within the framework of Creation, and it brings with it the obligation to live up to the divine image. He also states, however, that the divine is shown in the human being only in a shadowy form. In an allusion to Plato’s cave, he implies a central ontological difference, which he later takes up again: although the human being, as created in God’s image, is the most complete and admirable being in creation, Lavater envisions still more elevated entities of which the human being is only a caricature. This idea is evidently informed by the notion of an ascending scala naturae that extends beyond the human being; within this schema, the human being is a higher entity but not the highest. Humanity’s position is rendered relative by still more perfect beings, the angels. Lavater’s earlier statements regarding a possible ascending chain of being differ from later assertions. In the Physiognomische Fragmente, he initially distinguishes his position from that of Giambattista della Porta and argues for a strict boundary between animal and human being. He particularly rejects the possibility of an affinity between humans and apes. “O man, you are no ape – and the ape is no man.”42 And, as already discussed, Lavater assumes a basic form for all human beings that, in spite of all modifications, maintains a specific proportionality. “Nature shapes all human beings in accordance with a basic form, which is varied in manifold ways but always retains a parallelism and the same proportions, like the pantograph or the parallel ruler.”43 But Lavater later abandons this delimitation and adopts a schema closer to the scala naturae, a gradually perfecting line of development, and alters his idea of the relationship of the human being to animals. Just as Robinet, Diderot, and Herder assume a dynamic prototype that generates manifold forms through variation and self-optimization, Lavater later comes to believe that animal physiognomy can be humanized through gradual modifications of the initial basic form. Both the fifth volume of Nachgelassene Schriften (1802) and the fourth volume of the first French edition of his physiognomics, which was published posthumously in 1803 by his son Heinrich, feature two large-format charts that, over 24 profile images, show the graduated transformation of a frog’s head into the ideal face of Apollo. In his accompanying analysis of the images, Lavater uses the term “animality lines.”44 He based the metamorphic charts on a watercolour cycle that has been dated to 1795.45 An additional page (also included in Lavater’s Nachgelassene Schriften and in the fourth volume of the French edition of his physiognomics) shows twelve frontal views of the graduated transformation of a frog’s

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head into a woman’s face. The charts show how, in the process of humanization, the basic forms of the face dynamically shift and gradually harmonize. Lavater attempts to identify them in geometric terms as “profile angles” and, from the front, as “facial angles.” Commentators on Lavater’s work have seen in these charts evidence that Lavater reflected, at least hypothetically, on the possibility of a transformative process of development. Lavater himself refers in this context to “samples of my theory of evolution” (Figure 7.2).46 The French translation begins with an emphatically formulated passage in which the author assumes that the diversity of life emerges through the transformation of a unitary basic form. At the same time, however, he strives to preserve a hierarchy of precedence and creation in which each species has received its particular form or imprint from God. “La Nature forma tout d’après une seule loi, dont l’harmonie constante & variée embrase les rapports les plus divers, & les dirige tous avec sagesse vers le meme [sic] but.” Lavater goes on to explain. “Il n’est rien dans l’immense étandue de la creation qui n’en porte la céleste empreinte. Tout, tout s’élève par dégrés [sic] de l’existence simple à la vie, de la vie à la puissance de vouloir.” Nothing is indeterminate in this hierarchy; everything has the specific form and characteristic lines (lignes caractéristiques) of its species. On this scala, animate beings are ascribed ideal rankings. Only the human being has been given the gift of a countenance wrought by grace, exhibiting “the most perfect ratios,” the “happiest proportions.” Thus, the human’s distinctive features include not only the will, but also an aesthetic moment. In addition, however, Lavater includes a distinctive religious feature: only the human being has the “élan de la pensée vers le principe de tant de merveilles.”47 Lavater understood his animality lines in a far-reaching sense, which also embedded the “human races” in the hierarchical system of the scala naturae. He constructed a physiognomic, aesthetically based system of rankings within the human genus, which he interpreted as an “evolutionary” order. In this Eurocentric schematic order, the dark “races” are positioned in the problematic boundary zone only just above animalism, while Europeans (including European emigrants) are positioned in physiognomic terms close to ancient Greek classicism, as expressed, above all, in the artistic form of the god Apollo. Paradoxically, the theologian Lavater subjects empirical data to moral evaluation, which in his hierarchically structured physiognomy ultimately results in a discriminatory ethnic and racial hierarchy as well as a corresponding gender hierarchy.

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Figure 7.2 Johann Kaspar Lavater, from the frog to a woman’s face, Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 5 (in folding charts at back).

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In his aesthetically based rankings, Lavater drew on the work of the Dutch physician, anatomist, and drawing teacher, Petrus Camper, who had already identified horizontal and vertical “facial lines” as measurable dimensions. Camper had produced comparative anatomical series, which showed increasing “facial line angles” along a scale on which apes were followed by black people, “Orientals,” and then Europeans. Camper combined his knowledge as a physician with his interest in art and his profession as a drawing teacher. He was also of the opinion that ancient Greek sculpture portrayed human beings in their most sublime form. From the beginning of the 1770s on, Camper worked – at the same time as Lavater but without his awareness – on his own conception of physiognomy, one that combined anatomical knowledge with anthropological perspectives. He owned a collection of skeletons and endeavoured to advance the discussion of the protean prototype by proving the existence of analogical structures in the skeletons of animals and humans. The lectures he gave at the Amsterdam drawing academy in 1778 were, along with eleven copperplate etchings, published posthumously by his son, Adriaan Gilles, in Berlin. Using comparative anatomical studies of human beings, quadrupeds, birds, and fish, Camper aimed to provide artists with a deeper understanding of the connections among them and the morphological-functional specificities connected with animals’ behaviour and environments. When Camper draws the metamorphosis of, for example, a dog into a horse and a horse into a human being, his intention is to show the painter where to locate balance points in the upright stance and how the limbs are altered to accommodate the new form of the torso. When drawing, painters needed to depict a grass-eating horse, for example, as being able to reach the ground with its neck. Similarly, in the metamorphosis into the human being, painters needed to understand that the upright stance of the skeleton made the back flat, the forelegs became arms, and a strong clavicle was required because the head could no longer rest on a long neck. The illustrations also include a frog, which, in contrast to Lavater’s, however, does not undergo metamorphosis into a human being.48 For Lavater, Camper’s treatise Über den natürlichen Unterschied der Gesichtszüge in Menschen verschiedener Gegenden und verschiedenen Alters represented an important confirmation of his own work. The treatise was first published in 1792 by Adriaan Gilles in a translation by Samuel Thomas von Sömmering. Lavater praises Camper’s work as an “astute treatise,” even though he claims that Camper’s facial proportions are not “defined enough” to completely satisfy “the physiognomists.” Nevertheless, he

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particularly recommends the work to illustrators.49 He places Camper in a line of artistic and art-historical predecessors and contemporary naturalists that begins with the measuring artist, Albrecht Dürer, and leads through Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as the art historian of Greek sculpture, to the naturalists Buffon, Sömmering, Blumenbach, and Gall. Lavater adopted Camper’s biometry of the animal and human cranium to a greater extent than he admitted. Camper had structured his succession of developmental stages on how far forward the jaw projected. The result was an almost self-evident Eurocentric perspective in which a developmental line from Africans to Asians and Europeans shows the upper and lower jaws, which are so pronounced in apes, progressively receding. In the case of the orang-utan, Camper measures a facial angle of fifty-eight degrees. He clearly delimits the spectrum of human beings from animals. The lower boundary (the “minimum”) is seventy degrees, which he had measured on a young black man. According to Camper, the greatest angle between the facial lines is found in Europeans and measures eighty degrees. This angle, however, is exceeded by the facial angle found on ancient Greek sculptures, which reach an ideal of one hundred degrees. But he notes in several places that this ideal measurement of one hundred degrees is purely an artistic product, an aesthetic idealization by Greek artists. “The beauty of antiquity is thus not to be found in nature but only in the ideal, according to Winkelmann [sic].”50 Lavater closely adheres to Camper’s numerical specifications when he prescribes a precisely measurable facial angle “for each type of animal and every human race.” The profile angle of animality increases from “dog, frog, bird” to the “tailed apes” and the “orangutans,” which, as the highest animal species, attain a facial angle of fifty-eight degrees, as also calculated by Camper. In Lavater’s view, the lowest traces of humanity begin from sixty degrees onward, with the “Angolan negro” and the “Oriental” reaching seventy degrees. Whereas the general spectrum of humanity, with “all its anomalies,” remains within this range of sixty to seventy degrees, the most beautiful European attains a facial angle of eighty degrees. Lavater admits that only the ancient depiction of heroes (but not the ancient Greek human being) has a profile angle of one hundred degrees.51 But he argues that selected great thinkers, like Aristotle and Montesquieu, along with politicians and rulers such as Pitt and Friedrich II of Prussia, exhibit in the frontal view the ideal facial proportions of Apollo Pythius.52 Lavater attributes moral-intellectual values to these facial angles. His evolutionary line thus becomes a moral line that casts the expression

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of animality as negative and the human expression of reason as generally positive. The “more pointed” a profile angle, the “less ambitious and productive the creature.” In the frontal-face angle, the trapezoid form is a “cipher of intelligence and greatness.”53 Such conclusions are informed by a religiously based, allegorical conception of animal and human being, the emblematic character of which is supposedly given an objectivity by mathematical forms and figures. Since Linnaeus, the great naturalists had begun to accept that apes and human beings were positioned adjacent to one another in the biological hierarchy. In his later work, Lavater also presupposes that the ape and the human being abut on the ideally graduated scala naturae.54 This assumption makes it all the more surprising that he chooses the frog as the initial form to exemplify the metamorphosis into the human being. Lavater characterizes the frog (knowing full well that, from Pliny and Ovid on, as well as in the Bible, the frog was seen as unclean) in terms of his allegorical-moral animal physiognomy, and he sees it as an “image bouffie de la nature la plus ignoble & la plus bestiale.”55 In a universalist gesture, Lavater extends his scala far behind the ape to the frog, which, according to his measurements, exhibits a particularly narrow facial angle, only half as wide as that of the ape. Here, he is concerned with “positioning the transitions from brutal ugliness to ideal beauty, from the satanic to the divine sublime, from animality … to the initial humanization of the Samoyed, from here up to a Neuton [Newton] and Kant within an extrapolatable standard.”56 Yet the human being, even the European human being, is not at the top of the scale. Lavater considers that even Apollo could appear as a caricature in the eyes of higher beings, such as the angels. Perhaps it occurred to him that human beings see the frog as a caricature in a comparable way. In his later work, Lavater posited that the human face is necessarily concealed in distorted form in the animal, just as the highly developed human face, historically and developmentally, refers in distorted form to the divine. Lavater’s thesis about the transformation of the frog into the human being reveals that his thinking is based on the principle of a metamorphosis that is analogous to Creation. This teleological evolutionary history also embraces the concepts of palingenesis. In his work Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, Lavater extends his graduated metamorphosis to the transfigured bodies of the angels. His search for the physiognomically perfect representation of Christ also refers to the construct of a gradually developing metamorphosis. If human physiognomy is merely a stage in the plan of Creation, Christ, the son of God, must be symbolized in a

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shining form that already includes its future transfiguration. Lavater sets his notion of human beings as shadows of the divine form against the backdrop of a theology of light. The Apollo of the Belvedere is, perhaps, the ultimate idealization of the human being passed down from Greek antiquity. For Lavater the theologian, the highest level of perfection is attained in God, who stands at the beginning and eschatological end of the entire developmental process. Towards the end of the eighth volume of the Physiognomische Fragmente, Lavater, referring to the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, gives voice to this eschatological view when he exclaims: Now we perceive in parts – and our interpretation and commentary is piecemeal! Away with these fragments when perfection comes! What I write is still the babbling of a child! One day it will seem like childish ideas and endeavors when I see man! For presently we see the glory of the human being only through a dark glass – soon face to face – it is fragmented; then I will completely know – how I – am known by he from whom and through whom and in whom all things are!57

Thus, Lavater also comprehends his Physiognomische Fragmente as a fundamentally flawed piece of work that must be measured against a conceivable, higher form of knowledge that transcends the mere shadow of the divine, as found in human beings.

NOTES 1 This essay presents a number of aspects of a larger research project, the findings of which have recently been published under the title Die Hieroglyphe im 18. Jahrhundert: Theorien zwischen Aufklärung und Esoterik, Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 2015). See also Annette Graczyk, “Lavaters Neubegründung der Physiognomik zwischen Aufklärung, christlicher Religion und Esoterik,” in Aufklärung und Esoterik – Wege in die Moderne, ed. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Renko Geffarth, and Markus Meumann (Berlin, 2013), 322–39. I draw on Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1775–8), quoting from the facsimile version, with an afterword by Walter Brednow (Zurich, 1968–9, 4:[3]–47). Physiognomische Fragmente was one of the most expensive book publications of its time; each volume cost 24 Reichstaler. See also Ingrid Goritschnig

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3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

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and Erik Stephan, eds., Johann Caspar Lavater: Die Signatur der Seele – Physiognomische Studienblätter aus der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Stadtmuseum Jena, 23 June–25 August 2001, and Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau, 8 September–28 October 2001 (Jena, 2001), 8. Between 1768 and 1778, Lavater published Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, a fourvolume work devoted to esoteric speculation and visions of the post-mortal existence of human beings. Von der Physiognomik (Leipzig, 1772), reprinted as Von der Physiognomik und Hundert physiognomische Regeln, ed. Karl Riha and Carsten Zelle (Frankfurt a.M., 1991), 9–62. Louis de Jaucourt, “Physionomie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris, 1751–80), 12:1765, 538. “Physiognomica,” in Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, ed. Johann Heinrich Zedler (Leipzig, 1732–54), 27:1741, col. 2239–40. Christian Adam Peuschel, Abhandlung von der Physiognomie, Metoposcopie und Chiromantie: Mit einer Vorrede, darinnen die Gewißheit der Weißagungen aus dem Gesichte, der Stirn und den Händen gründlich dargethan wird, welcher am Ende noch einige Betrachtungen und Anweisungen zu weißagen beygefügt worden, die zur blossen Belustigung dienen (Leipzig, 1769). Peuschel’s readers included the young Goethe. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 256–7. Here Peuschel draws on reports by the physician, natural philosopher, and mathematician Girolamo Cardanus, who taught during the sixteenth century as a professor of medicine in Pavia and Bologna. Cardanus’s many interests included physiognomy, which he regarded as the art of reading facial striations. See Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The World and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Harvard, 2001). Peuschel, Abhandlung von der Physiognomie, 253. Ibid., 301. Von der Physiognomik, 37. Physiognomische Fragmente, 1:165. Von der Physiognomik, 20. Lavater explicitly criticizes Peuschel in this regard; see 32–3. It is therefore revealing that in Physiognomische Fragmente, the author takes up and alters Peuschel’s irregular cross, which the latter saw as predicting that the individual concerned would die on the gallows. In Lavater’s view, this sign no longer provides objective information but is only a symptom that symbolically supports the physiognomist’s “total impression.” The physiognomist sees only “passions, plans, betrayal in this face that could lead to acts worthy of death.” See Physiognomische Fragmente, 4:132.

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14 Physiognomische Fragmente, 4:39. 15 In 1789, however, Lavater formulated “secret rules” for a narrow circle of friends, which initially were only circulated in handwritten form. Here he presented the fundamentals of his physiognomy in a hundred simple sentences; these are known today under the title of Hundert physiognomische Regeln. One consequence of this summarization was the reduction of his physiognomic ideas to caricature. Following an unauthorized publication in 1793, they appeared in Lavater’s Nachgelassene Schriften, accompanied by numerous etchings; they are reprinted in Von der Physiognomik, 63–145. 16 Physiognomische Fragmente, 3:122. 17 Ibid., 4:156. 18 Lavater later had his collection transformed into a proper display, but he was ultimately compelled to sell it due to the enormous sums required for his art acquisitions and commissions. It was also for financial reasons that his son, Heinrich, also later sold his father’s collection of drawings and prints to his friend Fries, a Viennese banker. Fries in turn sold the collection in 1828 to Emperor Francis I, who had it installed in his private library. Today the collection, which comprises over 22,000 sheets of paper, forms a special collection in the Austrian National Library. Lavater’s writings are administered by the Zurich Central Library. 19 Von der Physiognomik, 55. 20 Physiognomische Fragmente, 4:157. 21 Ibid. 22 Von der Physiognomik, 54. 23 Physiognomische Fragmente, 1:n.p. [6]. 24 Giambattista della Porta, Menschliche Physiognomy, daß ist: Ein gewisse Weiß und Regel, wie man auß der eusserlichen Gestalt, Statur und Form deß Menschlichen Leibs … schliessen könne, wie derselbige auch innerlich … geartet sey … (Frankfurt a.M., 1601). 25 See Richard T. Gray, “Aufklärung und Anti-Aufklärung: Wissenschaftlichkeit und Zeichenbegriff in Lavaters ‘Physiognomik,’” in Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen: Zugänge zu Johann Kaspar Lavater, ed. Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Weigelt (Göttingen, 1994), 166–78; citing 168. 26 On Wolff and Lavater, see ibid., 168–9. 27 Physiognomische Fragmente, 1:33. 28 Scholars have, in part, taken a somewhat sceptical approach to Lavater’s Christ physiognomy and dealt, above all, with its paradoxical aspects. See Gerhard Wolf, “‘… sed ne taceatur’: Lavaters Grille mit den Christusköpfen und die Tradition der authentischen Bilder,” in Der exzentrische Blick: Gespräch über Physiognomik, ed. Claudia Schmölders (Berlin, 1996),

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33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42

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43–76. See also Gerhard Wolf and Georg Traska, “Povero pastore: Die Unerreichbarkeit der Physiognomie Christi,” in Das Kunstkabinett des Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. G. Mraz and U. Schögl (Vienna, 1999), 120–37. Lavater not only used traditional depictions of Christ in his Physiognomische Fragmente but also had heads of Christ depicted in accordance with his own, in part extensive, instructions, particularly by Daniel Chodowiecki; see Heinrich Dilly, “Nicht Freund, noch Liebe: Johann Caspar Lavaters Unternehmen der ‘Physiognomischen Fragmente’ und Daniel Chodowiecki,” in Physis und Norm: Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Manfred Beetz, Jörn Garber, and Heinz Thoma (Göttingen, 2007), 482–96. A more detailed study of Lavater’s Christology has been made, above all, by Klaas Huizing, who describes Lavater’s enterprise as “theological physiognomy”; in another essay, he even speaks of the “physiognomic proof of God’s existence”; see Klaas Huizing, Das erlesene Gesicht: Vorschule einer physiognomischen Theologie (Gütersloh, 1992); and Klass Huizing, “Verschattete Epiphanie: Lavaters physiognomischer Gottesbeweis,” in Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen, ed. Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Weigelt (Göttingen, 1994), 61–78. Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, vol. 2 of Lavater: Ausgewählte Werke in historischkritischer Ausgabe, ed. Ursula Caflisch-Schnetzler (Zurich, 2001), 452. Ibid. Ibid., 454. Hartmut Böhme, “Der sprechende Leib: Die Semiotiken des Körpers am Ende des l8. Jahrhunderts und ihre hermetische Tradition,” in Hartmut Böhme, Natur und Subjekt (Frankfurt a.M., 1988), 179–211; citing 201. Physiognomische Fragmente, 4:40. Ibid. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Über die Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen,” in Göttinger Taschen Calender für 1778, reprinted in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, vol. 3 (Munich, 1972), 256–95. Von der Physiognomik, 26. Martin Blankenburg, “Wandlung und Wirkung der Physiognomik: Versuch einer Spurensicherung,” in Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen, ed. Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Weigelt (Göttingen, 1994), 179–213; citing 186–7. Physiognomische Fragmente, 4:40. Ibid., 1:34. Von der Physiognomik, 25. Ibid. Physiognomische Fragmente, 2:180.

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43 Ibid., 4:459. 44 “Über Animalitäts-Linien,” in Hundert physiognomische Regeln, mit vielerlei Kupfern, vol. 5 of Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Georg Geßner (Zurich, 1802), 101–10 (the charts are printed on fold-out pages at the back of the volume); and Jean Gaspard [Johann Caspar] Lavater, “Sur les lignes d’animalité,” in Essai sur la physiognomonie [sic] destiné à faire connoître l’homme [et] à le faire aimer (La Haye, 1781–1803), 4:[315]–324; charts, 322 and after 324. 45 See Uwe Schögl, “Vom Frosch zum Dichter-Apoll: Morphologische Entwicklungsreihen bei Lavater,” in Das Kunstkabinett des Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Gerda Mraz and Uwe Schögl (Vienna, 1999), 164–71; citing 165. 46 “Über Animalitäts-Linien,” 107. Hans-Georg von Arburg points out that the evolutionary-historical context is still more pronounced in the later ten-volume edition of the Physiognomy, which was published by the physician Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe in 1806–9. Moreau de la Sarthe established a relationship between Lavater’s and Camper’s physiognomic developmental series and the evolutionary theory of Lamarque. See HansGeorg von Arburg, “Johann Caspar Lavaters Physiognomik: Geschichte – Methodik – Wirkung,” in Das Kunstkabinett des Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Gerda Mraz and Uwe Schögl (Vienna, 1999), 52. 47 “Sur les lignes d’animalité,” 316–17. 48 See Peter Camper’s lectures, held in the Amsterdam drawing academy: Über den Ausdruck der verschiedenen Leidenschaften durch die Gesichtszüge; über die bewunderungswürdige Ähnlichkeit im Bau des Menschen, der vierfüssigen Thiere, der Vögel und Fische; und über die Schönheit der Formen …, ed. A.G. Camper, trans. G. Schatz (Berlin, 1793). The illustrations, in part on fold-out pages, are in the appendix. 49 “Über Animalitäts-Linien,” 104. 50 Peter Camper, Über den natürlichen Unterschied der Gesichtszüge in Menschen verschiedener Gegenden und verschiedenen Alters (Berlin, 1792), 63. 51 “Sur les lignes d’animalité,” 321. 52 Ibid., 324. 53 “Über Animalitäts-Linien,” 105, 110. 54 In the Physiognomische Fragmente, he was not so sure and, in a departure from Della Porta, referred to apes, horses, and elephants as animals that were assumed to be the closest to human beings. 55 “Sur les lignes d’animalité,” 322. 56 “Über Animalitäts-Linien,” 104. 57 Physiognomische Fragmente, 1:56.

chapter eight

The Preaching Philosopher: Andreas Weber (1718–81) between Wolffian Philosophy and Heterodox Theology R E N K O G E F F A RT H

In 1748, a largely unknown lecturer in philosophy at the University of Halle named Andreas Weber submitted the first part of what would become his chief work, Die Uebereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade (The Conformity of Nature and Grace). By 1750, the published work spanned four volumes encompassing more than two thousand pages. In the book, he shared with his readers the audience that his work sought to address. In philosophical lectures one finds both those who devote themselves to theology, as well as those who would serve the world through knowledge of the law and the medical arts. The former must be prepared for theology and receive weapons with which they can battle the enemies of the cross of Christ. The others do not lean upon the revealed truths, and it is good and proper that one ensures in the philosophical sciences that they do not get mixed up in detours into religion, for which they would otherwise have much opportunity.1

The author defines how theology students should be instructed and how students of jurisprudence and the natural sciences should be protected from religious enthusiasm. What was a lecturer in philosophy doing explaining theology to future pastors? This was seemingly quite a bizarre project, for even if the four faculties were not as sharply distinguished from one another in the eighteenth century as they are today, Weber was still greatly overstepping the bounds of academic freedom. And yet, bizarre as it may seem, this was the expression of an uncommonly erudite person accustomed both to composing oral philosophical treatises inspired by Christian Wolff and effortlessly writing arcane lectures inspired by the esoteric doctrines of the Freemasons. This seeming

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contradiction is the point of departure for the present essay. As we shall see, plural identities – in an intellectual, not psychological, sense – characterized Enlightenment intellectuals who, for example, oscillated between Wolffian philosophy and Masonic esoterica or, in the terminology of Peter Hanns Reill, between rational theology – i.e., rational Christianity – on the one hand and vitalism on the other.2

Introduction: Freemasonry between Perceptions of Antiquity and the Enlightenment The background to the following observations is eighteenth-century Freemasonry in its relationship with academic and university-affiliated circles. Including a brief sketch of Freemasonry’s history and ideas here may serve as an aid to better understanding the eighteenth century in general and, more to the point, the Masonic lodges in Halle. In contemporary and modern literature concerning the society of Freemasons, the reader is confronted with a phalanx of different myths, which are grounded in their respective times and distort the historical view in many ways. For instance, in the final decades of the twentieth century, the Freemasons were generally regarded as an organizational form of the Enlightenment, much like reading clubs and lending libraries. This view accommodated the self-image of modern Freemasons, who regarded their forerunners as belonging to the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment, but also owed much to the paradigm of social history.3 In this context, the genesis of Freemasonry has been set in the year 1717, when several London lodges united into a common organization.4 However, these lodges had existed before that. Their history has generally been traced along a line of tradition that led from medieval masons’ guilds and cathedral workshops – i.e., of practising craftsmen – directly to Freemasonry.5 This conception has, in fact, served more to legitimize Freemasonry than to provide orientation with historically verifiable facts, and it sheds no light at all on the substance of the movement. If, for the moment, we put aside the “Enlightenment” version, which fails us already in that Freemasonry is substantially older than it purports, there is one salient, unanswered question regarding the role of practised masonry, or the stonemason’s art, which remains visible in the symbols of Freemasonry – the compass, the square, the trowel, the hammer, and rough and hewn stone. Likewise unanswered is what made the lodges so universally attractive and rendered them one of the most important organizations of the eighteenth century.

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The Masonic lodges that we encounter in Halle in the eighteenth century included hardly any actual masons, indeed hardly any craftsmen, among their members. These were, instead, assemblies of bourgeois and intellectual elites. Their tradition stretches back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their roots lie in Scotland. Using Scottish sources from the seventeenth century, the Scottish historian David Stevenson has investigated the emergence of Freemasonry and related it to the history of Western esotericism. Accordingly, the connection to masonry cannot be completely dismissed, but the essential context is not the skilled trade but its superordinated science, architecture.6 Seventeenth-century lodges were soon also accessible to those interested individuals who did not have the appropriate occupation. These, then, became the “accepted” or “gentleman” masons. These outsiders were intrigued by the idea of a universal science that promised access to Adamite knowledge. This was geometry, which the Freemasons held to be the foundation of all science. Geometry was considered to be the science of Creation, and architecture is based on geometry. This idea was later expressed in the formulation that God is “the Grand Architect of the Universe.” Architecture, the art of building, was considered a sacred art. In the guise of architectura sacra, it dealt with the edifices mentioned in biblical texts – first and foremost the Temple of Solomon. Researching such architecture was, essentially, a quest for divine principles in geometry, in the Adamite proto-language laid down in the buildings’ construction – or, quite explicitly, for the knowledge that, engraved onto stone pillars, had survived the Deluge and was rediscovered by a certain Hermes. That is according to the Masonic Constitutions, a statutory document from the early eighteenth century.7 Obviously, therefore, the roots of Freemasonry must be sought in the context of the Renaissance adoption of antiquity, even if the texts providing the key to higher knowledge were not hermetic, but geometric. This quest simultaneously provided the foundation myth of the Freemasons: that they could be traced back to Adam himself; the society was as old as God’s Creation. There is another factor that places Freemasonry in the Western esoteric context – namely, adopting the doctrines of Rosicrucianism in the first third of the seventeenth century. A direct connection between early Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians is a matter of speculation. Yet it was at this time – the early seventeenth century – that interest in the Rosicrucian ideas of a universal science of religion and philosophy led to the search for an invisible fraternity, and the Masonic lodges gained appeal

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because of their unique blend of creative science and mnemonics set against the background of their adoption of hermeticism.8 What did all of this mean for the lodges? Initially, it was a matter of certain wisdom passed on during an initiation ritual, some secret knowledge. By 1600, anyone wanting to join a lodge of masons had to undergo such a ritual. What exactly it consisted of, then and later, has not been recorded. This applied to the lodges in Halle and elsewhere. The law of secrecy and ban on writing down knowledge passed on orally during initiations was kept over a long period of time, and this is why, until the eighteenth century, information about the Freemasons includes hardly any mention of what was passed on during initiations.9 We can, however, assume that it had to do with architectura sacra and especially the construction of the Temple of Solomon, as confirmed by later accounts from the mid-eighteenth century. Recurring elements of these accounts include the two pillars of Solomon’s Temple, Boaz and Jachin, which could be considered symbols of the knowledge of geometry. This was where the two pillars referenced earlier, upon which ancient knowledge had survived the Deluge, entered the rituals of the eighteenth century. Of particular interest here is the initiation ritual for the degree of Master Mason. It is preceded by initiations into Apprentice and Fellowcraft, but in Halle, for example, in many cases it took just a few weeks after acceptance into the society for an individual to be initiated as a Master. Sometimes it was only a matter of days. Therefore, we can devote most of our attention here to the Master Degree initiation.10 The Master Degree is somewhat younger than Freemasonry, which initially included only two degrees. Yet the degree had existed for several years by the time the first lodge was founded in Halle in the 1740s. In reference to the biblical master builder of Solomon’s Temple, Hiram, a legend was specially created that focused on Hiram’s murder, his burial, and the exhumation and viewing of the body. This magic ritual gave rise to the “master’s word” of Hiram. This scene is recreated in the Masonic ritual of the Third Degree. The candidate dies a symbolic death and is restored to life as a Master; in this process, he learns the Master’s Word. This restoration puts him on the same level as Hiram – i.e., a master builder of Solomon’s Temple. As a consequence, then, the Master Degree symbolically completes the temple of wisdom. Also, in effect, the establishment of a lodge was the practical expression of the endeavour to build the Temple of Solomon and thereby establish the conditions for learning divine wisdom. Consequently, Stevenson calls these seventeenth-century lodges “memory temples.”11 Because the

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lodges in Halle followed the tradition of English Freemasonry, one can certainly assume that the initiation ceremony for Master Mason took place there along similar lines, even if no direct proof of this exists. Of course, the Freemasons also adopted the central tenets of Enlightenment thought. Freemasonry was therefore modified by the Enlightenment to a certain extent, or Enlightenment thinking was integrated into Masonic thought. For example, the idea of religious tolerance can be readily interpreted in the sense of the Enlightenment, just as the availability of membership applied to all social backgrounds. From the mideighteenth century, however, this contrasted with the deepening development of esoterically charged “high degrees” in the so-called Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which were devoted explicitly, if only within an arcane space, to esoteric practices. This development gave rise to more and more new systems, which competed with one another over the quality of the secrets they purported to hold.12 This process, in turn, spawned the assumption that esoteric currents had begun influencing Masonic practice only in the eighteenth century. Historically, however, this obviously does not tally. Freemasonry is an organizational form of early modern esotericism, which originated in the later Renaissance and adopted the traditions of antiquity. Freemasonry’s special significance lies in the fact that it used this esotericism to elevate an individual’s occupation to an institutional level and, in the eighteenth century, combine it with the core ideas of the Enlightenment.

“Academic Lodges”: Freemasons in Halle The first lodge in Halle, At the Three Golden Keys, was founded as a union of students, mainly of law, who had previously been accepted into the society at other lodges – i.e., not in Halle. However, a significant and generally acknowledged public interest in Freemasonry in Halle predated the lodge’s founding, as witnessed by the publication catalogue of Carl Hermann Hemmerde, a publisher in Halle, who in 1742 was offering Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons at a price of 12 Groschen, even though the book could not have had any “institutional” customers there at the time.13 Maintaining secrecy and discretion about early Freemasonry in Halle was therefore probably not accorded especially high priority. Following the general custom, the Halle Freemasons submitted an application to the mother lodge in Berlin, At the Three Globes, to establish a new lodge. The corresponding constitutional patent still survives.14

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The Halle lodge was a “filiation” of the Berlin Grand Lodge, which itself stood in the tradition of the London Grand Lodge, which certainly bestowed tradition, dignity, and, above all, legitimacy on the Halle lodge. The first new member whose initial contact with Freemasonry was at this lodge was Andreas Weber, a philosophy lecturer at the Fridericiana, who also extended the lodge’s membership beyond the student body. According to the lodge’s statutes, neither political nor religious affairs could be discussed, but no atheists could be accepted either, and each “brother” had to worship the Creator.15 This corresponded to the fundamental proposition of the constitutions of Freemasonry, which had originated in England about twenty years earlier. On the subject of worship, they stipulated that each member should believe in at least some kind of “original religion,” although not any specific denomination.16 The passage is formulated on the basis of Christianity, but establishes no binding ties to any one religion. Faith, then, was made a private matter, and devotional objects were to play no part in meetings. We have no information on what Masonic writings the lodge’s members read, whether at meetings or in private. Therefore, we also know nothing about what texts were known to them beyond the substance of the initiation rituals. We do know that one member of the lodge, its long-time chairman, or Worshipful Master, the orphanage doctor David Samuel Madai, did alchemistic work in the pharmacy of the orphanage, but this was part of his professional duties and had no direct link to his membership in the lodge.17 Also, some speeches given at the lodge on special occasions have survived as printed editions sold in bookshops. This will become relevant to the present essay’s argumentation.

Andreas Weber The Wolffian philosopher Andreas Weber (1718–81) was one of the earliest members of At the Three Golden Keys and simultaneously the first member of the university faculty to be accepted into the lodge. The admission probably took place in March 1744, after the actual election to membership, or ballotage, was held on 16 December 1743, itself only a few days after the lodge was founded.18 Weber, who came from a town near Halle called Eisleben, studied at Jena, Leipzig, and Halle beginning in 1738, and Christian Wolff, who returned to Halle in 1740, was one of his teachers. From 1742, Weber lectured in philosophy and mathematics at Halle University. Named an associate professor of philosophy in 1749, and pursuing the theological

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interests expressed in his publications, Weber sought permission to give lectures in theology in addition to those he gave in philosophy.19 This may seem astonishing from today’s perspective, but it was in no way a unique occurrence. An older faculty colleague, the orientalist Christian Benedict Michaelis (1680–1764), since 1714 a full professor in the philosophy faculty, likewise held a professorship in theology from 1731.20 One prominent example of the link between philosophical and theological interests was, of course, Weber’s mentor, Christian Wolff (1679– 1754), who, although a member of the philosophy faculty, not only published on topics of theology but was also famously accused of atheism and expelled from Prussia in 1723.21 Still, his influence on theology was so great that the Protestant “transitional theology” of the first half of the eighteenth century, protagonists of which included the Halle theologian Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–57), is considered at least partially “theological Wolffianism,” and, hence, Wolffian philosophy displays a distinctly theological side.22 Still, although Wolff had long since been rehabilitated, Andreas Weber was denied permission to lecture in theology, allegedly at the instigation of the faculty dean at the time, the very same Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten.23 The fact that he had already defended a theologically oriented dissertation in Jena in 1740, under the chairmanship of Thomas Christoph Luger (1718–71), later pastor at Bützow, apparently counted little in this decision.24 In Göttingen, too, where Weber was granted a full professorship in philosophy in 1750 with the assurance of being allowed to hold private theological seminars, he was stripped of this privilege as a result of conflicts between the philosophy and theology faculties. This development certainly allows us to draw conclusions about his rejection in Halle.25 Only in 1770, when he was appointed to a professorship in Kiel after two decades of teaching in Göttingen, did he receive permission to lecture on theology: in Kiel, his title was both full professor of philosophy and associate professor of theology.26 Despite his rejection by the theologians in Halle, and even as a professor in the philosophy faculty, Weber devoted himself mainly to theological matters. All of his writings published before his appointment in Göttingen – to which he would add hardly any in the remaining three decades of his career – treat theological subjects. However, it should also be noted that in 1750, shortly before his appointment in Göttingen, Weber temporarily took the position of church superintendent in his hometown of Eisleben. It seems that even in an institutional sense, he was not without ties to the subject of theology.27

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The Freemason Weber’s first publication after chairing a dissertation defended by Wolfgang Ludwig Gräfenhahn (1718–67)28 was, however, one of the abovementioned Masonic lodge speeches: in 1744, he published a small booklet titled Das Erhabene, worzu die Freymäurerey ihre ächten Schüler führet … vorgestellet von dem Bruder Redner (The Sublime, to Which Freemasonry Leads Its True Students … Presented by Brother Speaker). “Brother Speaker” was the lecturer in philosophy Andreas Weber.29 It is notable that these and other speeches from the discreet space of the lodge were published without naming the author or, usually, the publisher. One can only surmise what strategy was behind this practice and who might have known the author from other contexts. It is conceivable that the writings were meant to be distributed within the Masonic network beyond the local area and that publishing them was therefore seen as unproblematic because non-Freemasons would be unfamiliar with the subjects and parlance and therefore unable to extract any information that might threaten the lodges. The fact that the speeches could nonetheless be traced to their authors is thanks to an uncommonly fortuitous circumstance in the source material: the names of the speakers are included in the transcripts. Still, in the dedication of his speech, Weber writes that he has omitted some passages “which included things that may be shown to brethren, but not to others.”30 Internal Masonic matters were to be removed from texts for printing unless the formulation was meant to assert to a sceptical public the existence of some secret that was, in fact, non-existent. Nonetheless, Weber maintains the reader’s curiosity over this secret by pledging that nothing will ever be laid open of that art and science that remains hidden from all those who are not our brethren. The art by which the square learns to guide the entire construction of the Temple shall remain concealed.31

Now the subject of Weber’s speech on the “sublime in Freemasonry” is less an aesthetic theory, as one might expect, given the concept current in the eighteenth century,32 than an attempt to present “the sublime” to the brethren of the Halle lodge as a moral objective and special trait of Freemasonry. In particular, Weber addresses the correlation of the sublime and perfection, and he thereby points to a frequent Masonic topic – namely, that of the perfection that the Freemason should encounter in

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his work in the lodge, and only there. It follows that Freemasonry itself is a sublime thing. The Freemason is aware that maximum perfection accounts for sublimity. Thus he knows that what leads to perfection is already sublime. He concludes that God is the most sublime being ever to be imagined. He considers the creatures; he can see that they differ in perfection; he concludes one is more sublime than the other. He draws a double conclusion: It is foolish to prefer creatures to the creator; it is ridiculous to prefer the usage of lower creatures to that of the more perfect. He then imagines the perfection of spirit, understanding, will and freedom and judges that those spirits are sublime that force up these advantages as much as they can. He casts his eye upon men; he concludes: they are spirits. He sees what comprises the sublime in a person: among some he observes that they possess so few of men’s virtues that they may not even know of these nor be able to imagine them. He holds these therefore to be base souls who must take their seat in the lowest of places. He sees others who may exercise their reason yet desire not to improve the will. He flees these: he assigns them also to the base. He sees of others that they may espouse virtue yet seek to banish the enlightenment of reason: neither to these will He consort with. Among some He recognizes a feeble resolve to improve the reason, will and liberty, yet who still allow themselves to be drawn and swayed by their passions: these, too, He avoids. Finally, he beholds a few who, with the greatest magnanimity and constancy, enlighten their reason, perfect their will, and regard their liberty as their most precious property. And it is these among mortals whom he assigns to the sublime: these are the ones with whom he consorts: these he accepts as his dearest and most intimate brethren.33

Here Weber places Freemasons above all other men – or “creatures” – and thereby, following his argument, lifts them closer to the “most sublime of all beings” – i.e., God. Accordingly, the Freemasons are the sublime ones “among mortals.” Furthermore, parallels to the theological interests of Weber the philosopher appear when he remarks that a Freemason reveres revelation and places his trust in God and when he states that it is impossible “that a Freemason who properly understands his building could be a stray mind, a denier of God’s existence, a naturalist, or a dreamer.”34 This is a listing of very heterogeneous polemical categories with which he draws a clear boundary between Freemasons

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and all others. For Weber, therefore, the symbolic Masonic construction of the Temple of Solomon is a religious matter, though not an explicitly Christian one. Freemasonry commands its pupils to build a Temple to the Eternal Being, in which one does one’s dutiful service in proper manifestations of devotion, reverence, love, praise, gratitude and humility to the same. And for this very reason does it command its dedicated brethren to attend to gaining a thorough awareness of God and divine matters, and to conduct their affairs accordingly. A service to God that consists only of cold and blind breaths, or of a handful of phrases committed to memory, cannot be one that a Freemason would hold as true. He seeks to determine his deeds in a persuasive insight into God and his qualities. This is why he highly esteems a founded knowledge of the revealed and natural truths. That is why he seeks to enlighten and widen his reason, yet to sanctify his will.35

In Weber’s words, it is from “art and science” that Freemasonry draws this knowledge, itself “solely a virtue of true brethren.”36 The fruition of Masonic labour and the Masonic reverence is the Temple, “whose duration is constant and invariable, whose assembly is wondrous, whose appearance is majestic and whose comfortable use is indescribable”;37 with these words, Weber turns, after all, to the rhetoric of sublimity: the Freemason’s amazement at the majesty of the wondrous, indescribable edifice of the Temple ennobles him and elevates him above the base existence of his “profane” neighbours. This emotional dimension of Masonic work is then augmented by an avid “investigation of the sciences.”38 The latter was especially significant for Weber’s philosophy, and it imbues the sublimity of Freemasonry with a character suitable to the Age of Enlightenment. A true student of our art seeks to elevate his reason solely that his mind might be improved. Reason enlightened by the sciences must extend grounds for aspiring to virtue, wisdom and the fear of God. The will should endeavor to those same things that bring forth honor to God, welfare to one’s neighbor, and peace and satisfaction to one’s own mind.39

The sublimity of Freemasonry thereby serves a higher purpose, that of every “true brother” and “real pupil” perfecting his mind and soul; hence, in this case, sublimity also carries a sense of ennoblement.40 As we have already seen, the Masonic conception of this earliest lodge in Halle,

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reflected in Weber’s speech, was very open regarding religion. Moreover, the again central motif of perfection through Masonic endeavour can certainly be interpreted in an Enlightenment context, as the latter passage makes clear. Yet the religious dimension of this perfection remains unmistakable, and Weber leaves open the question of whether it can be reached through divine grace alone or whether membership in the order of Freemasons gives the individual the tools he needs to approach his own personal perfection.

The Theologian When we follow the intellectual development of Andreas Weber with reference to his publications, we find, after the anonymously published Masonic speech of 1744, two treatises from the year 1745, published under his full name: Proof That a True Religion Necessarily Requires, in Our Circumstances, a Revealed Faith Founded upon Divine Satisfaction and That a Denier of God, Even in His Denial of God, Is Yet Bound to Live in Fear of God.41 With these writings, Weber launched a campaign, which would last until his departure from Halle, to defend the Christian religion against its critics and seek to prove its legitimacy through reason. In this campaign, he turned against not only the “deniers of God” referred to in the second title but also the assumption that using reason contradicts Christianity’s revealed nature. That, indeed, places Weber in the best tradition of his academic teacher Christian Wolff, who had produced his own effort to explain the Holy Scripture based on reason and to prove the existence of God by means of the same.42 The first of these two treatises, the Proof, is aimed at those critics of religion who pay heed solely to reason at the expense of faith or revelation. Weber attempts instead to use reason to demonstrate the veracity of the Christian faith. These deniers of faith and revelation should be made aware of their error and weakness. Therefore we must demonstrate that, under the circumstances that humanity finds itself in, a true religion must necessarily require a faith based on the glorification of God made known by a divine revelation. And, because these enemies refuse to admit revelation, then reason, which by their own admission they value highly, should be called upon, and the truth of this sentence be derived from a secure foundation.43

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Even if Weber announces here his intention to campaign against reason-based critiques of religion, and to defend revelation in particular, he is still obviously convinced of the need to do so on the basis of reason. Indeed, the groundwork for such a “rational Christianity” is not yet directed against the revealed character of the Bible; it assumes it from the start. This removes Weber from the historicalcritical method of Enlightenment theology, which would be developed only decades later. Yet its main protagonist, Johann Salomo Semler, was studying in Halle under Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten just at the time of Weber’s first publications, thereby coming into contact with both Weber and theological Wolffianism. It is entirely possible that Semler even attended Weber’s lectures, which were, of course, held at the philosophy faculty.44 In his Proof of faith and revelation, Weber seeks to present his conception of “true religion” in several steps. These include, first of all, the individual’s recognition of God and the orientation of all human activity towards “reasons for motivation” derived from the idea of God.45 “True religion” must be distinguished from “false religion,” whereby Weber holds religion in general to be “the manner of serving GOD.”46 He furthermore distinguishes between “internal” and “external religious service” – i.e., internal and external religion – whereby the internal is expressed in prayer, for example, while the external may find its expression in charity towards others.47 Also, “internal service” preconditions the sincerity of the “external,” the latter being, in any case, and in the absence of the former, “only the appearance of religion”48. The foundation of true religion is true “knowledge,” which is taken either from the light of nature or a divine revelation, and is hence either natural or revealed. And whether natural religion is true or false, or certain and scientific, is a philosophical question, or probable, or rests on opinion.… Hence a revealed service to GOD can certainly be philosophical and therefore scientific.49

Therefore, in no way do revelation and science contradict one another; indeed, even religious service on the basis of divine revelation is a philosophical matter. In any case, at this point, Weber introduces the idea of “natural religion,” which would supply knowledge “from the light of nature” – whereby he integrates a classic topic of both critical and apologetic debates over religion into his concept of “true religion.”50 The more perfect – namely, the more “clear, certain and complete” – one’s

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knowledge of God is, the more perfect “true religion” is as well.51 And yet the human’s scope for knowing God remains limited. It is thus uncontested that for all time much of God will remain concealed, dark and mysterious to us. We may well, if we attend to our duties, and constantly strive to attain clear knowledge of that highest of beings, approach that light more and more in which he resides, but we ourselves shall never come into this light.52

For Weber, revelation obviously retains a significance that stretches beyond that of reason and that reason will never fully grasp. In this attempt to harmonize reason and revelation without ceding the essential positions of faith – i.e., without exposing oneself to suspicion of “atheistery” – the Wolffian philosopher now becomes clearly visible. Indeed, this position runs through all of Weber’s subsequent academic writing. He places special value here on the distinction between nature and “true religion,” and, in doing so, he stresses the privileged hope for salvation for those who believe in “true religion” over those who trust solely in the “laws of nature” – not in a physical sense, but one of natural law.53 Let us assume that one is completely satisfied by the laws of nature and observes all their duties; he would be able to attain a blessedness, though by far not as lofty a one as the man who is completely devoted to true religion. It is precisely herein that one sees that every man is bound to accept true religion and to be perfectly devoted to it.54

Hence, in terms of “blessedness,” he distinguishes not only “true religion” from any false faith but also religion altogether from the views of those whom, in his 1744 Masonic speech, he (quite imprecisely) referred to as “naturalists.” Therefore, one cannot accuse him of a belief that “according to which we, using our own strength, can influence and preserve our own welfare,”55 a conclusion that, for its part, the Masonic speech certainly permitted, if not explicitly intended. Hence, in a public speech as a university professor, Weber rejects the figure of self-perfection common in Masonic contexts; he even goes so far as to postulate that the “perfect observation of the laws of nature impels us towards true religion.” And he seeks to prove “that we are wretched” despite all of our (admittedly imperfect) efforts to completely observe the laws of nature and true religion in equal measure.56

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Weber’s observations on the imperfections of the human body demonstrate just how far-reaching his concept is of self-afflicted imperfection and the wretchedness that results. In the tradition of humoral pathology, he takes the perfect harmony of the body’s solid and fluid components as the foundation for health and beauty; the imperfection that, in reality, obviously predominates among these factors is, for him, the actual reason behind ugliness, decline, death, and decay.57 This perspective also highlights the significance of perfection. If, by Weber’s standards, human beings were able to attain perfection, it would bring them not only blessedness but also beauty and the absence of illness, death, and deterioration. These aspects add up to a concept of salvation in the present world as salvation in the afterlife would no longer need to include much of the above. Still, Weber insists that self-perfection is impossible and likewise categorically rejects the conceivable alternative, that attaining perfection in this world would be possible with the help of others.58 Promises of salvation coming from third parties must therefore be greeted sceptically – something that should likewise apply to the basic ideas of Freemasonry. With regard to blessedness in this world, Weber does not relinquish all hope. He points instead to entities that even those who are less than perfect can turn to. These are “spirits of greater intellect and power than ours”; in the Bible, they are “good angels,” whose “reality becomes probable through many circumstances.”59 However, even these spirits are “finite” and therefore incapable of relieving human imperfection.60 All that remains is the hope for “a miracle, indeed one through divine satisfaction … in which we must well and truly believe” and which can be shared with humanity solely through divine revelation.61 In the following, we will briefly sketch some of Weber’s other academic writings so as to finally attempt a comparison of his academic and Masonic positions. In the same year as his Proof, which we have just examined, Andreas Weber published a monograph, mentioned above, that was meant to show That a Denier of God, Even in His Denial of God, Is Yet Bound to Live in Fear of God.62 Weber had already examined “God denial” in his Proof and pointed out that even a denier of God is ultimately subject to divine revelation.63 However, he fundamentally doubts whether there can be such a thing as a consistent denier of God. Merely the obvious perfection of Creation compels the observer to presume a divine Creator, and anything else would be “either foolish or malicious.”64 He attempts to counter malice as a motivation for denying God’s existence with a reasoned proof of the “obligation” of a God-fearing life and maintains, for example, that even the denier of God is bound by the

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doubtlessly God-given law of nature and is therefore obligated to fear God, even without acknowledging the reality of God.65 In his other publications, too, Andreas Weber devoted himself to the self-imposed task of “explaining and fortifying Christianity through natural knowledge.”66 In 1746, he endeavoured to prove the necessity of divine revelation, which was evident through nature as grasped by humans – or the human mind. All manifestation of any truths by GOD is already a divine revelation. And in this understanding belong all truths manifested through nature that instruct and impel, and can rightly be named divine revelations. Had GOD not created this world as it is; had he not placed beings in it that reason as they do; these would then also not gain any knowledge of those things that they recognize in a certain manner. GOD is thus the final cause of all that can only be recognized in the world by those minds.67

These minds are the chief reason that Earth was created, Weber believed, and although they alone were capable of recognizing the perfection of Creation, people – themselves minds – were capable only of grasping the planet Earth and not the other “worldly bodies” – i.e., planets and fixed stars. Thus, it was “most highly probable … that on the other worldly bodies there exist other reasoning creatures, and therefore minds.”68 This idea is not as remote as it may seem. Only a few years later, Immanuel Kant published – albeit anonymously – his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, a cosmology and cosmogony that dealt with the origins and nature of the universe and to which he added an appendix titled “On the Residents of the Stars.”69 However, from the necessity of revelation postulated by Weber, one need take only a few short steps intellectually to arrive at a consequence that appears less than conducive to the “fortification of Christianity.” Humans, as beings of Creation and the sole earthly creatures endowed with reason, are deprived of uniqueness in the universe on grounds of logic, for the divine Creator made them as only one of many species capable of insight.

The Preaching Philosopher Shortly before leaving for Göttingen, Weber finally published his chief work in terms of length: Die Übereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade (The Conformity of Nature and Grace), which was published in two volumes, the

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latter in three further parts, between 1748 and 1750.70 Having been a subject of pre-Reformation theology – for instance, by Thomas Aquinas71 – the topic probably seemed quite traditional to its theological readership. However, the title of Weber’s work is conspicuously similar to that of a German-language edition published in 1740 in Jena of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadologie, translated and edited by the Jena philosopher Heinrich Köhler and Erlangen theologian Caspar Jacob Huth: Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden, und von der schönen Übereinstimmung zwischen dem Reiche der Natur und dem Reiche der Gnade (The Propositions of Baron von Leibniz on Monads, and of the Beautiful Conformity between the Realm of Nature and the Realm of Grace).72 This publication, one of several Kleine Philosophische Schriften (Small Philosophical Writings) by Leibniz, was moreover furnished with an extensive foreword from the pen of Christian Wolff, written shortly after his return to Halle. Thus, the topic of the conformity of nature and grace had already been associated with an exceedingly prominent name, and Weber’s work plainly takes its place within a philosophical-theological tradition that, if not established by Leibniz and Wolff, was at least profoundly marked by their contributions. Hence, Weber’s choice of title also appears less than coincidental; indeed, it was practically strategic. We can certainly regard it as a targeted positioning in a widely recognized and broadly discussed context. Although Weber’s monograph was apparently aimed at a purely academic audience and written under his own name, the dedication suggests a connection, after all, with the Masonic lodge: in each sub-volume, the entire work is explicitly dedicated to the long-time Master of the Lodge David Samuel Madai, director of the “medication expedition” at the city orphanage, although naturally without mentioning the Masonic connection and hence recognizable as such only to the “initiated.” Without being aware of this link, readers must have asked themselves why Weber had dedicated this work to Madai – who neither taught at the university nor held an official position that commanded any influence on Weber’s behalf. From today’s perspective, his chairmanship of the lodge remains the sole plausible explanation. This monograph was where, for the first time, Weber laid down the personal motivation and the origins of his special philosophical theology, or theological philosophy. In my academic years I have first studied the teachings of God, for which from my youth onward I felt an instinct and favor within myself, which other suggestions made to me could also not subdue. However, under the

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faithful direction of my teachers, I have had … good opportunities to associate these with the natural sciences. I recognized the excellence and usefulness of these in the theological sciences.73

If, by emphasizing the usefulness of the natural sciences for theology, he suggests an affinity with physico-theology,74 Weber subsequently seeks rather to unify philosophy and theology in the service of religion in general as neither of the two sciences appeared to suffice for blessedness, to which his early writings had already accorded central importance. Here blessedness suggests itself as a “satisfaction of the spirit.” Certainly, metaphysical abstractions and observations are not that which can indicate the true satisfaction of the spirit. Only the path that Christ has taught us leads us there. And should one therefore not, to the extent that GOD lends time and ability, make oneself more familiar with it? … In philosophical lectures one finds both those who devote themselves to theology, as well as those who would serve the world through knowledge of the law and the medical arts. The former must be prepared for theology and receive weapons with which they can battle the enemies of the cross of Christ. The others do not lean upon the revealed truths, and it is good and proper that one ensures in the philosophical sciences that they do not get mixed up in detours into religion, for which they would otherwise have much opportunity.75

Thus, Weber sees his mission as a university lecturer to teach both students of the “teachings of God” – i.e., theology students – as well as those studying law and medicine. And, instead of explaining philosophy to theology students, he intends to instruct all students equally in theology. That would make theology students capable defenders of the Christian faith, while helping all others to grasp that theology is not their field and that they should therefore steer clear of theological topics – advice that apparently did not apply to Weber himself. Here we may discover why, in 1749, the theology faculty would not permit Weber the philosopher to hold lectures in theology. Even at the philosophy faculty, he apparently lectured chiefly on theological topics, and then, in 1748, he went so far as to express the opinion that it was his job to place the weaponry for defending Christianity into the hands of theology students. This could only mean that he found the training of theologians in Halle lacking, a point that he considered especially salient.

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He had prepared his work, spanning more than 2,200 pages, with the writings discussed above, which, by his own account, “were not received badly.”76 The sole author from whom he had received objections had published these anonymously. This did not stop Weber from citing him at length and thereby attempting to explain that the criticism was baseless. Published in Berlin in 1747, the accusatory work was titled Uhrsachen [sic] des Verfalls der Religion und der einreissenden Freydenkerey (Causes of the Decline of Religion and Destructive Libertine Thinking) and written by the cameralist and Saxe-Weimar court counsellor Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1717–71), a fact he had publicly admitted by 1748. Weber probably knew this; in his own words, the author was an “unnamed, yet not concealed lively writer.” 77 Justi was a respected authority on constitutional law who wrote little on religious issues and, at the time that Weber’s work appeared, had made a reputation as a poet. He was not least the author of a prize-winning book on the theory of monads – although as a critic of it – and was, hence, if one follows the polarization prevailing in Halle at the time, an opponent of “Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy.”78 In the same preface to his mammoth project in which he defends himself against Justi’s accusations, Weber finally formulates the plan that underlies The Conformity of Nature and Grace. “I had first undertaken, little by little, to elaborate a theory of Christianity and to show its conformity with nature.”79 Given the grand scope of such a project, rather than taking on a “theory of Christianity,” he restricted himself to the “entire edifice of grace,” whose “conformity with nature” was to be demonstrated in the book. And more esteem for religion is stimulated when one makes comprehensible how flawless everything is within it, and how precisely it agrees with itself and our nature and its final purpose, that of glorifying the name of GOD and our welfare.80

It should be noted here that Weber is addressing neither his students nor those attending his lectures nor “novices in the sciences,” but his faculty colleagues. He presupposes “already proven and known lessons of the world’s knowledge, and [makes] use of the same.”81 He thereby explicitly submits his work to the debate among philosophers and stresses that his argument is “drawn from metaphysics and the law of nature.”82 Given his above-formulated claim, however, it should come as no surprise that he might have expected criticism from the theologians’ corner. In its conception, the work is altogether dogmatic, a “theoretical structure” whose effect appears to have remained, in the end, very limited, for Andreas

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Weber’s thinking has not caused any notable reflection in the history of either theology or philosophy. Evidently, the bridge that he intended to build between the two disciplines failed not only in the practice of lecturing at the University of Halle. As a concise overview of Weber’s dogmatics, the index he appended to the final volume of 1750 is quite revealing. An obvious starting point would be to define the basic terms in The Conformity of Nature and Grace – i.e., “conformity,” “nature,” and “grace.” And, indeed, Weber’s book is geared towards this approach. Its entire conception follows the explanation of terms. Approximately the first hundred segments, spanning two hundred pages of the first volume, are dedicated to the understanding of “nature”; nearly another hundred treat the concept of “grace,” and the first volume’s remaining one hundred thirty segments are devoted to the “conformity” of the two. The book’s sheer crush of text, which obviously serves its claim of fully and exhaustively examining its subjects, gives Weber’s opus an encyclopedic character. By dividing his remarks into brief segments of only a few pages each, and occasionally just one paragraph, augmented by marginalia containing detailed headings for the respective segments (itself a traditional form of presentation, obviously adopted from his mentor, Christian Wolff), Weber builds his argument, discretely and constructively, on every (from his viewpoint) conceivable aspect and possible objection. In elucidating the term “nature,” for example, Weber occupies himself with distinguishing between the “physical and spiritual world.”83 While he treats the former in close accordance with Wolff and explicit differentiation to Descartes, and pays special attention to power, movement, and mechanics in general,84 for him the latter is “the invisible [world], the city of GOD,” whose exact constitution, however, he refuses to examine. Weber expressly declines to provide a study of subjects such as spirits or to distinguish among planets, spirits, guardian angels, and “possessions of the devil.” Instead, he refers this entire complex to the authority of another Wolffian, the Jena philosophy professor Johann Peter Reusch (1691–1758) and his Systema Metaphysicum of 1735.85 In Weber’s view, enquiring into the “nature of a spirit” is not a matter primarily of these “spirits” but what link exists between the body and spirit and whether there can be such a thing as disembodied spirits – something that he denies. He thereby indirectly deals, after all, with the issues that he has referred to Reusch – for example, in remarking that a very subtle body of a spirit can certainly work on “the human imagination, as happens among possessions.”86

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Also instructive for our purposes is Weber’s discussion of the term “secret,” which is relevant in a Masonic context. It is explained in the chapter on “nature” in connection with the knowledge of things that lie beyond the reach of human reason, and it concludes that chapter.87 As all things beyond reason can be fathomed using only “analogue” and “symbolic” knowledge and not directly,88 Weber refuses to understand as “secrets” things that, trivially, are simply concealed and whose understanding could be achieved through initiation – for example, because they are “kept concealed.”89 Instead, these are fields of knowledge that per se remain barred from human understanding. Through divine revelation, however, secrets can quite certainly be uncovered; this path of knowledge also lies beyond reason and the “light of nature.”90 If, in turn, one applies this perspective to Weber’s Masonic lodge, then the secrets shared with the brethren are either not actually secret or are made known to them through divine revelation. Neither possibility quite corresponds to the Masonic “mainstream” and especially not the early Freemasonry of which the Halle lodge must be considered an example.91 This means, conversely, that Weber was not only a heterodox theologian without formal legitimation but also a heterodox Freemason. Placing Weber in the ranks of Wolff’s pupils seems as logically consistent for his explicit references to his mentor as it does for the reprint of The Conformity of Nature and Grace as part of the Collected Works of Christian Wolff; thus, Weber would have to be placed in the vicinity of the Wolffians Johann Christoph Gottsched and Daniel Nettelbladt. The latter was, like Weber, a professor at the University of Halle and, moreover, a Freemason at the first Halle lodge. In his writings, Weber can be considered both a Wolffian Mason and a Masonic Wolffian, and, with this association, he becomes a prototype of a pluralized intellectual identity that has taken the first steps towards a concept of individualized religiosity.

Excursus and Conclusion: Between Alchemy and Wolffianism – Weber the Younger As both a supplement and a conclusion, an excursus may enhance our appreciation for an even less well-known Wolffian philosopher, Andreas Weber’s younger brother, Christian Weber (died 1762). Like his sibling, he studied philosophy, and he was appointed in 1752 as an associate to, and then in 1756 as a full professor in, the philosophy faculty at Halle University. There he lectured on the philosophy of Christian Wolff, and his writings were restricted to probably only three published

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dissertations – one of which was his own.92 Although the chairman of the committee receiving his inaugural dissertation was the mathematician Johann Joachim Lange (1698–1765), son of the Wolff rival Joachim Lange (1670–1744), Christian Weber is characterized in the scant source material available as a Wolffian.93 Following Wolff’s death in 1754, he acquired his house in what was then Halle’s professors’ quarter, at 413 Märkerstrasse, and remained, in that sense, physically linked to Wolffianism.94 Despite being less significant than his older brother in the development of conceptions of individualized religiosity, Christian Weber is of interest here because, as a student in 1747, he likewise became a member of the first Masonic lodge in Halle and, that same year, took the position of speaker there.95 In this function, he gave a speech at the lodge that he not only composed at the same time that his older brother was completing his first volume of The Conformity of Nature and Grace but that was also printed in 1748: Der unüberwindliche Freymaurer (The Invincible Freemason), a song of praise to the resilience of Freemasonry against attacks by “profane” – i.e., non-Masonic – sources. It was first delivered in 1747 in the form of an ode by “a brother,” presumably Christian Weber, during a ceremony at the Halle lodge, probably on the Feast of St. John.96 On 13 September of that year, another not otherwise specified ceremony was held at which the “brother speaker” – this time certainly Christian Weber – gave a speech on “The Perfection of Our Mysterious Art.”97 We do not know anything about the substance of the speech, but it was probably not by chance that the wording of the title, as recorded by the lodge’s secretary, law student Johann Friedrich Stauffenbühl, is reminiscent of the speech given by Andreas Weber in 1744 on the sublime and the subject of the latter’s philosophical-theological magnum opus. The fact that the two brothers held the position of speaker at the Halle lodge consecutively indicates no more and no less than a strong intellectual link between the lodge’s activities and theological Wolffianism in Halle. The significance of the speeches in shaping the lodge’s profile should not be underestimated. Here, too, Christian Weber is a key figure because with other, unnamed individuals he pursued an interest in alchemy, as the far more influential theologian Johann Salomo Semler later reported. Here in Halle there was no lack of several so-called artists or lovers of this great art, who relied however on books and written processes, and as far as I

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know, did not quite achieve their wishes. On this matter I have had various interviews with Professor Philos. Weber, who frequented the company of some individuals who worked very assiduously, in part to make borax and in part also gold.98

“Professor Philos. Weber” can be none other than Christian Weber as during Semler’s teaching activities at Halle there was no other professor in the philosophy faculty by that name.99 This also makes the younger Weber a direct personal link between the first Masonic lodge in Halle and the non-Mason Semler and between the Wolffian philosophers at Halle University and a group of alchemists. Whether these were likewise Freemasons can no longer be determined, yet it seems unlikely as the first lodge no longer existed during the time frame that Semler was referring to – i.e., the mid-1750s100 – and Weber was not a member of the second lodge, although members with advanced degrees (known as “Salem” under Philipp Samuel Rosa) did display alchemistic tendencies. Contacts may, of course, have existed, but this must remain a matter of speculation. The intellectual profile of the two Weber brothers, especially Andreas, serves as an example of the extent to which, even in the eighteenth century, the publication context influenced the vantage point. Within the context of those “discreet” activities in the lodge, one could think, speak, and write differently than one might be expected to, given one’s public position at the university – and the purely academic writings produced within it. An individual author – whether theologian, philosopher, jurist, or medical doctor – could therefore harbour differing and apparently irreconcilable intellectual “identities” depending on the audience he was addressing.

NOTES 1 Andreas Weber, preface to Die Uebereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade wird, sowol überhaupt, als auch insbesondere in allen zum Rathe Gottes von unserer Seligkeit erforderlichen Lehren des Christenthums gründlich erwiesen, 2 vols. in 4 separate parts (Frankfurt, 1748–50), vol. 1, n.p. (translation by Nicolas Kumanoff). 2 Referring esp. to the underlying concept in Peter Hanns Reill: Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 2005). 3 See also the survey by Holger Zaunstöck, Sozietätslandschaft und

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Mitgliederstrukturen: Die mitteldeutschen Aufklärungsgesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert, Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung 9 (Tübingen, 1999). The work of Helmut Reinalter may be considered an example of this viewpoint – e.g., the survey Freimaurer und Geheimbünde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa, ed. Helmut Reinalter, Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 403 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). See Reinhold Bendel, “Die Ableitung der Freimaurerei von den Steinmetzbruderschaften, Tempelritterorden und älteren Rosenkreuzerbruderschaften,” in Geheime Gesellschaft: Weimar und die deutsche Freimaurereied, ed. Joachim Berger and Klaus-Jürgen Grün, catalogue of an exhibition by Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, Schiller Museum Weimar, 21 June–31 December 2002 (Munich, 2002), 62–74. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge, 1990). The following remarks on the history of Masonic thought – on geometry, architecture, and mnemonics – are heavily indebted to Stevenson’s work. James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons: Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. of That Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity; For the Use of the Lodges, 2nd ed. (London, 1723), 3. See Paul Arnold, Histoire des Rose-Croix et Les origines de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris, 1990). See Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “‘You shall not reveal any pairt of what you shall hear or see …’: Geheimnis und Öffentlichkeit in masonischen Systemen des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Esoterik und Christentum: Religionsgeschichtliche und theologische Perspektiven, ed. Michael Bergunder and Daniel Cyranka (Leipzig, 2005), 11–29. On Masonic degrees, see, e.g., Hans Biedermann, Das verlorene Meisterwort: Bausteine zu einer Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte des Freimaurertums, 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1999), 55–86. The following remarks on the Master degree are based on Biedermann. Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, 142–3. On the Masonic high degrees, a good source remains René Le Forestier, Die templerische und okkultistische Freimaurerei im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 4 vols., ed. Antoine Faivre, ed. German edition Alain Durocher (Leimen, 1987–92). See the entry “Andersons, der Freymäurer neues Constitutionen Buch” in the section “Neue Schrifften,” Wöchentliche Hallische Anzeigen 8 (1742), cols. 121–2. Included in “Constitutions, Histoires, Loix, Charges, Reglements & Usages de la très venerable Confrairie des Acceptés Francs & Libres Macons

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Renko Geffarth assembles en Corpse dans la juste & parfaite Loge aux 3 Clefs d’Or instituée par Permission speciale de sa Majesté Prussienne a Halle en Saxe le 14me Decembre L’An de Grace MDCCXLIII : Au nom de Dieu, Amen,” MS, DFM 7866, Deutsches Freimaurermuseum Bayreuth. Ibid.; see also “Gesetze der Ehrwürdigen Gesellschaft der Frey Mäurer überhaupt betreffend,” in Von J.W. Zinnendorf gesammelte Korrespondenz, Akten und Rechnungen der von 1743 bis 1749 in Halle arbeitenden Loge “Zu den drei goldenen Schlüsseln,” 1746–9, GStA PK, Freimaurerlogen und freimaurerähnliche Vereinigungen, 5.2 B 54 Johannisloge “Zu den drei goldenen Schlüsseln,” Berlin, no. 217, 44–5. Anderson, Constitutions of the Free-Masons: “… oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves.” On Madai and the pharmacy of the Halle orphanage, see Wolfram Kaiser and Werner Piechocki, “Die Ärzte-Dynastie der Madai in Halle,” in Communicationes de Historia Artis Medicinae 60–1 (1971): 59–96; Medizin und Pharmazie in den Franckeschen Stiftungen, vol. 1 of Druckerschwärze und Goldtinktur: Zum 300jährigen Jubiläum der Apotheke und Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses zu Halle, ed. Franckesche Stiftungen zu Halle (Halle, 1998). Biographical information on Andreas Weber, unless otherwise specified, is taken from Heinrich Döring, Die gelehrten Theologen Deutschlands im achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Nach ihrem Leben und Wirken dargestellt, 4 vols. (Neustadt, 1831–5), vol. 4 (1835), 658–60. On acceptance to the lodge, see the protocol entry from 16 December 1743 in “Constitutions, Histoires, Loix, Charges, Reglements & Usages,” fol. 8. The protocol entries for March have been torn out, so the date has been calculated from Weber’s lodge matriculation number; those accepted ahead of him were “received” in February, those after him in April (ibid., fol. 95). Other than brief references, there is no philosophical-history literature on Weber. His main work, Die Übereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade (see note 1), is available as a reprint in Wolff’s collected works; see Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, Abt. 3: Materialen und Dokumente, vols. 69.1, 69.2.1 and 69.2.2 (Hildesheim, 2003–6); to date, only vols. 1, 2.(1.)1 and 2.(1.)2 have been published; the volume count of the reprints is wrong, vols. 2.1 and 2.2 are actually vol. 2.1. See also the biographical article in Döring, Die gelehrten Theologen Deutschlands. Wilhelm Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universität zu Halle, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1894), 1:275; see also the article on Michaelis by Carl Gustav Adolf Siegfried in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig 1885), 21:676–7.

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21 See Ulrich Barth, “Von der Theologia naturalis zur natürlichen Religion: Wolff – Reimarus – Spalding,” in Christian Wolff und die europäische Aufklärung: Akten des 1. Internationalen Christian-Wolff-Kongresses, Halle (Saale), 4–8 April 2004 – Teil 1, Wolffiana II.1, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg und Oliver-Pierre Rudolph (Hildesheim, 2007), 247–74, esp., e.g., 248, 252. 22 See, e.g., Ulrich Barth, Aufgeklärter Protestantismus (Tübingen, 2004), 184. 23 See Johann Christian Förster, Uebersicht der Geschichte der Universität zu Halle in ihrem ersten Jahrhunderte (Halle, 1799), 173–4; Döring, Die gelehrten Theologen Deutschlands. 24 Thomas Christoph Luger (Präses)/Andreas Weber (Resp.), “Differentiam Spirituum Finitorum Ex Illorum Actionibus Erutam …,” diss., Jena, 1740. Biographical data on Luger is drawn from Johann Georg Meusel, Lexikon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller, 15 vols. (Leipzig, 1802–16). vol. 8 (1808), 414–15. 25 Reinhard Wittram, “Die Universität und ihre Fakultäten” (gala lecture held on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, 17 November 1962), Göttinger Universitätsreden 39, p. 9 and n9. 26 See Jendris Alwast, Geschichte der Theologischen Fakultät an der ChristianAlbrechts-Universität Kiel – Teil 1, 1665–1865: Von ihrer Gründung an der gottorfisch-herzoglichen Christian-Albrechts-Universität bis zum Ende der gesamtstaatlichen Zeit (Norderstedt, 2008), 55, 128. 27 According to an entry in Christian Ernst von Windheim, Göttingische Philosophische Bibliothek …, vol. 3, Part 2 (Hannover, 1750), 190. In the dedication of the final volume of his chief work, Die Übereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade, Weber himself writes in 1750, “I cannot resist the unexpected divine call that has brought me to a spiritual office in my fatherland without insulting my conscience.” 28 Andreas Weber (Präses)/Wolfgang Ludwig Gräfenhahn (Resp.), “Dissertatio Philosophica De Cognitione Spiritus Finiti Circa Mysteria,” diss., Halle, 1742. With the dissertation he defended in 1740 (see note 24), Weber had possibly already earned a master’s degree in Jena. Wolfgang Ludwig Gräfenhahn was later a gymnasium teacher and consistory counsellor in Bayreuth; see Meusel, Lexikon, vol. 4 (1804), 319–21. 29 Andreas Weber, Das Erhabene, worzu die Freymäurerey ihre ächten Schüler führet, wurde in einer Rede an dem Johannis=Tage 1744 der gerechten und vollkommenen Versammlung derer Freymäurer in Halle vorgestellet von dem Bruder Redner (Halle, 1744). That Weber was speaker at the lodge and author of this speech comes from the lodge minutes from 24 June 1744, the Feast of St. John, “Constitutions,” fol. 28.

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30 Weber, Das Erhabene, VII. 31 Ibid., 13. 32 On the idea of the sublime in the eighteenth century, see Dietmar Till, Das doppelte Erhabene: Eine Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts, Studien zur deutschen Literatur 175 (Tübingen, 2006) esp. 234–316; Christine Pries, ed., Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn, (Weinheim, 1989); Winfried Wehle, “Das Erhabene: Aufklärung durch Aufregung,” in Das 18. Jahrhundert: Aufklärung, ed. Paul Geyer, Eichstätter Kolloquium 3 (Regensburg, 1995), 9–22. 33 Weber, Das Erhabene, 7–8. 34 Ibid., 11–12. 35 Ibid., 12. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 14. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Quotes ibid., 17–18. 41 Andreas Weber, Beweiß, daß eine wahre Religion bey unserm Umständen nothwendig einen geoffenbahrten Glauben erfordere, der auf eine göttliche Genugthung gegründet ist (Frankfurt, 1745); this is the earlier of the two works as the preface (unpaged) dates from 20 March 1745; Weber, Daß ein Gottes-Verleugner, bey seiner Gottes-Verleugnung, dennoch verbunden sey, gottesfürchtig zu leben, wird bewiesen (Halle, 1745); this work is not dated more precisely, yet refers (p. 9 with note) to the former in the past tense. 42 On the relationship between reason and revelation in Christian Wolff, see Barth, “Theologia naturalis,” 252–60, esp. 252–4. 43 Weber, Beweiß, 5–6. 44 On “theological Wolffianism,” see Barth, “Theologia naturalis,” 248–60. 45 Weber, Beweiß, 10–11. 46 Ibid.,12, emphasis original. 47 Ibid., 13. 48 Ibid., 33. 49 Ibid., 14. 50 On “natural religion,” see, e.g., Winfried Schröder, “Natürliche Religion und Religionskritik in der deutschen Frühaufklärung,” in Strukturen der deutschen Frühaufklärung 1680–1720, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 168 (Göttingen, 2008), 147–64. 51 Weber, Beweiß, 15–16. 52 Ibid., 20.

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53 For Weber, “natural law” and “laws of nature” are not identical but “inseparably bound”; see ibid., 82. 54 Ibid., 44. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 45–51. 57 Ibid., 94–8. 58 Ibid., 120, e.g. 59 Ibid., 122. 60 Ibid., 122–4. 61 Ibid., 128–9, 151–6. 62 See note 41 above. 63 Weber, Beweiß, 27. 64 Weber, Gottes-Verleugner, 1. 65 Ibid., 52. 66 Andreas Weber, preface to Daß GOTT denen gefallenen Menschen eine Offenbarung habe geben müssen, wird bewiesen, und die Merckmahle derselben, vermittelst welcher sie von allen andern fälschlich davor gehaltenen unterschieden, und die heilige Schrift nur für die einige wahre Offenbarung gehalten werden kann (Frankfurt, 1746), n.p. 67 Ibid., 5–6. 68 Ibid., 45–6, quote 46. 69 Immanuel Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels … (Königsberg, 1755), app. 173–200. 70 See note 1 above. 71 See “Vollendung der Natur durch die Gnade: Thomas von Aquino (1225–1274),” vol. 4, ch. 5 of Die christlichen Lehrentwicklungen bis zum Ende des Spätmittelalters, ed. Carl Andresen et al. (Göttingen, 2011), 656–64. 72 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden, und von der schönen Übereinstimmung zwischen dem Reiche der Natur und dem Reiche der Gnade,” trans. and ed. Heinrich Köhler and Caspar Jacob Huth, in Des Freyherrn von Leibniz Kleinere Philosophische Schriften … (Jena, 1740), 1–40. 73 Weber, preface to Uebereinstimmung, vol. 1, n.p. 74 On Physikotheologie, see, e.g., Anne-Charlott Trepp, “Zwischen Inspiration und Isolation: Naturerkundung als Frömmigkeitspraxis in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitenblicke 5, no. 1 (2006): n.p., accessed 2 October 2013, http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2006/1/Trepp. 75 Weber, preface to Uebereinstimmung, vol. 1, n.p. 76 Quote ibid.

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77 Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, Uhrsachen des Verfalls der Religion und der einreissenden Freydenkerey (Berlin, 1747). Justi was acquainted with Weber’s Uhrsachen: “Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi … zeiget in dieser Schrift die Nichtigkeit aller Einwürfe und unhöflichen Anfälle, welche wider seine Untersuchung der Lehre von den Monaden und einfachen Dinge zum Vorschein gekommen sind …” (Frankfurt, 1748), 76. Weber’s comments appear in the preface to Uebereinstimmung. 78 See Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, Untersuchung der Lehre von den Monaden und einfachen Dingen, worinnen der Ungrund derselben gezeiget wird … (Berlin, 1748); the prize was awarded in 1747. On this and Justi in general, see Ferdinand Frensdorff, Über das Leben und die Schriften des Nationalökonomen J.H.G. von Justi (Göttingen, 1903). On monad theory, see esp. Hanns-Peter Neumann, ed., Der Monadenbegriff zwischen Spätrenaissance und Aufklärung (Berlin, 2009). 79 Weber, preface to Uebereinstimmung, vol. 1, n.p. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 1:101. 84 Ibid., 1:102–15. 85 Ibid., 1:116; Johann Peter Reusch, Systema metaphysicum antiquiorum atque recentiorum item propria dogmata et hypotheses exhibens (Jena, 1735), subsequent editions 1743, 1753, and reprinted in the same Christian Wolff collected works edition, Sec. 3, vol. 27.1, 27.2 (Hildesheim, 1990) as the “Pneumatica hypothetica” quoted by Weber (3rd ed. 1753), 910–1120. 86 Weber, Uebereinstimmung, 1:127–41, quotes 127, 132. 87 Ibid., 1:257–65. 88 Ibid., 1:248–52. 89 Ibid., 1:258–9. 90 Ibid., 1:260. 91 On secrecy and concealment in Freemasonry, see Neugebauer-Wölk, “You shall not reveal any pairt of what you shall hear or see ….” 92 Facts are drawn from Schrader, Geschichte, 2:562. Christian Weber defended his inaugural dissertation in 1750: Johann Joachim Lange (Präses)/Christian Weber (Resp.), “Cogitationes Philosophicae De Iurisprudentia Naturali In Statu Integritatis Et Corrupto, Praeprimis De Origine Iuris Perfecti Et Imperfecti Ex Statu Corrupto: Dissertatio Prior, Inauguralis In Qua Agitur Statu Integritatis Et Corrupto, Et De Obligatione Atque Lege Naturali Ad Hos Status Relatis,” phil. diss., Halle, 1750.

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93 On the Wolff-Lange conflict resp. between Wolff and the Pietists in Halle, see Albrecht Beutel, “Causa Wolffiana: Die Vertreibung Christian Wolffs aus Preußen 1723 als Kulminationspunkt des theologisch-politischen Konflikts zwischen halleschem Pietismus und Aufklärungsphilosophie,” in Beutel, Reflektierte Religion, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Protestantismus (Tübingen, 2007), 125–69. 94 Christian Wolff, Christian Wolffs eigene Lebensbeschreibung: Hrsg. mit einer Abhandlung über Wolff von Heinrich Wuttke (Leipzig, 1841), 79n1. There is no detailed biographical information on Christian Weber; only his academic career at the University of Halle is documented. 95 The acceptance took place on 14 March 1747, the election as speaker on 21 August 1747; see Constitutions, fol. 70, 73. 96 Christian Weber, Der unüberwindliche Freymäurer: Wurde bey der jährlichen Feyer des 5747ten Jahres in einer Ode besungen, von einem Bruder in Halle (Halle, 1748). The “jährlichen Feyer” is probably the Johannisfest, the highest ceremony of the Freemasons on the Feast of St. John, on 24 June. However, there is no entry of this in the 1747 protocol log. The first volume of Andreas Weber’s Uebereinstimmung was submitted for printing in 1747 as indicated in the “letter” from 25 September 1747, n.p. 97 Constitutions, fol. 76. 98 Johann Salomo Semler, D. Joh. Salomo Semlers Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst abgefaßt, 2 vols. (Halle, 1781–2), 1:323–4. 99 For the list of professors in the philosophy faculty, see Schrader, Geschichte, 2:562–7. 100 Semler describes a visit by his teacher Baumgarten, who died in 1757, in the same passage of his autobiography, so these events obviously took place in the 1750s; see Semler, Lebensbeschreibung, 1:330.

chapter nine

Between Myth and Archive, Alchemy and Science in Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Cabinet of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo C L O R I N DA D O N ATO

Introduction Peter Hanns Reill’s contributions to the evolution of scientific thought in the eighteenth century and the location of its practice have demonstrated how knowledge moved throughout Europe, adapting, expanding, evaluating, and repositioning over time and space. His identification of the particular moment, mid-eighteenth century, when mechanism, the mechanical philosophy of nature, began to wane in the face of new vitalistic discoveries1 inspires this study on Raimondo di Sangro, the Prince of San Severo, and his scientific cabinet in eighteenth-century Naples. Here the languages and beliefs of hermeticism and Newtonianism were jointly deployed, thus removing him until recently from serious consideration as an Enlightenment thinker. Peter Reill’s cross-cultural and disciplinary reading has brought to the fore numerous examples of how the mechanistic and anti-mechanistic languages of nature actually coexisted, rather than living in opposition to each other. Di Sangro moved precisely within this hybrid model of thinking and learning, using all means available to him to understand human life, its origins, and its trajectory. Di Sangro’s best-known work, the 1751 Lettera apologetica, was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books shortly after its publication for its contents, which included the origin of the world: the concept of the Archea as the life force of the world in relationship with the human soul, animal souls, and the generation of human beings, among others.2 Di Sangro’s life, scientific activity, and intellectual networks not only position us precisely at the interstices between mechanism and hermeticism; they also serve to exemplify the entry point into

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the interdisciplinary, transnational Enlightenment as well as introduce us to the thinkers who practised it across borders – reading, translating, discussing, and adapting each other’s work. The nodes and means of transmission of this activity have become, in recent years, topics of scholarly work – i.e., the geography of the Enlightenment – focusing as much on the how, where, and when as on the “who” in the eighteenth century.3 Thus, a further element of inspiration for this essay, stemming from the work of Peter Reill, is Di Sangro’s transnational pursuits – which moved him far beyond his Neapolitan home to the German states – particularly his fraternal and intellectual ties with the Freemasons and Illuminati, which stretched from Bayreuth to Dresden to Potsdam. Since Peter Reill argued for the widespread languages of nature that would ultimately set up the opposition between anti-mechanistic ideas and mechanism throughout eighteenth-century Europe, scholars such as Francesco Paolo de Ceglia have been writing about the relationship between animism and mechanism, including the similarities in the way these joint pursuits were conducted in the German states as well as southern Italy.4 As we shall see in this study, Di Sangro’s anatomical and chemical pursuits took place precisely in the space between the scientific and the occult, drawing from any number of published sources from all over Europe, while being shaped by events and pressures, both local and global, recent and ancient, as amply documented in the prince’s library holdings.5 The networks of Enlightenment communication moved in ways that we are only now beginning to fully comprehend, and Freemasonry was becoming an increasingly important avenue for exchange. Since Peter Reill began suggesting these lines of contact and knowledge exchange, a proliferation of research on Freemasonry has revealed the full extent of Masonic work and its European intent. One of the most important aspects of this research concerns the entwining of scientific and social interests across national borders, resulting in a set of interests and goals that may be described as pan-European. This investigation into the multifaceted theories and experiments of Raimondo di Sangro differs from much of what has been written about him in recent years as it parts ways with the plethora of superstition-mongering rehashings of his life and examines, instead, his intellectual, political, and affective ties with France, the German states, Switzerland, and the Vatican. What was once viewed as odd, eclectic, inconsistent, and unsystematic in his beliefs, practices, thought, and work is instead emerging as far more consistent with the strivings of many an eighteenth-century figure who straddled various worlds of knowledge and drew from them in creative and compelling ways.

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A variety of disparate sources has been assembled in the preparation of this enquiry – eighteenth-century encyclopedia entries, letters, paratextual material, and a number of the prince’s own writings – most of which, we hasten to add, have never received proper, systematic treatment. It is hoped that this research, modelled in many ways on the interdisciplinary queries of Peter Reill, may lead to a more comprehensive study of the Prince of San Severo in a European context so that he, too, may receive his due as one of the most important nodes of southern European enlightened knowledge, transmission, and exchange.

Raimondo di Sangro: Background and Milieu The headstone to Raimondo di Sangro’s mausoleum reads, “Vir mirus … in perscrutandis reconditis naturae arcanis celeberrimus …” (“Extraordinary man … renowned for his ability to investigate the most concealed of nature’s secrets”).6 As Leen Spruit has noted, even the very first essays written about the prince described the vast cultural background upon which he drew to make contributions to the myriad fields of military tactics, the Kabbalah, alchemy, oriental languages, technology, and the natural sciences.7 He was born in Torremaggiore (Foggia, Italy) in 1710, moving to Naples as a young boy with his parents and grandparents. He received his education in a Jesuit seminary, the Roman College of the Company of Jesus, where the future Benedict XIV was his friend and classmate. There he studied grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, natural philosophy, logic, biblical exegesis, mathematics, physics, and Greek. He was already trying to expand his knowledge beyond what was taught by undertaking a program of autodidactic learning and, when possible, hiring tutors to guide him further in mathematics, oriental languages, and the Kabbalah, to which he refers in his most famous work, the Lettera apologetica. After he returned to Naples, he met the most important figures in the cultural and scientific renewal of that city, including Celestino Galiani and Antonio Genovesi. As Spruit has also noted, these contacts would confirm his belief in Newtonian science, to which he refers in the Lettera apologetica, yet his Newtonianism must be read in the context of a broader cosmological synthesis to which the hermetic and Kabbalistic influences of English deism are also important components.8 His vast knowledge of the Kabbalist tradition was also complemented by his knowledge of English heretical texts. In particular, he appreciated their exploration of human liberty and their indifference to religion. Nonetheless, his brilliance

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and social skills earned him a number of important duties and titles, including a commendation from Charles III that conferred on him the honour of becoming his majesty’s chamberlain in 1742; the following year, he was admitted as a member of the Accademia della Crusca, Italy’s Florence-based language academy founded in 1582 and the model for the Académie française. His admission to this elite body of erudite men, protectors of the Italian language, was a significant marker of his status in the Italian states as a man of letters. The title page of his magnum opus, the Lettera apologetica dell’Esercitato accademico della Crusca, contenente la difesa del libro intitolato Lettere d’ una peruana per rispetto alla supposizione de’ Quipu scritta alla Duchessa di S… e dalla medesima fatta pubblicare (Letter in defence of the academician Esercitato of the Crusca, containing his defence of the book entitled Letters of a Peruvian woman concerning the hypothesis regarding the Quipu addressed to the Duchess of S**** and published by the same) (Naples 1750), featured his Accademia della Crusca (Crusca Academy) affiliation as well as his academic name, “Esercitato” (“Well-Rehearsed”) and his motto, “Esercitar mi sole.” (“Performance defines me”). The engraving on the title page was taken directly from the Crusca, featuring putti, who are engaged in milling and refining flour in keeping with the name of the academy: Crusca, meaning “chaff”; and the academy’s objective of selecting “the fairest flower/flour.” Finally, and of particular importance for our study, was his inclusion in the Cavalieri dell’ordine de San Gennaro (Knights of the Order of San Gennaro), which granted him entrance into the chapel where San Gennaro’s blood was kept. (However, he would be expelled from this chapel in 1751, after the publication of the Lettera apologetica, with its explicit references to the miracle of the saint, and his successful alchemical experimentation leading to the recreation, and thus debunking, of the miracle; this will be discussed later in this chapter.) Once he was banned from the ranks of the “protectors of the blood,” he fully engaged in his unique blend of operative and speculative forms of Masonic activity, which can be defined as esoteric artisanry, devoting himself to conducting experiments in his laboratory as well as to decorating the family chapel, La Capella di San Severo. Both laboratory and chapel have become sites of hermetic and scientific enquiry thanks to the objects that he left behind – in addition to the published findings he produced before 1751 – i.e., the anatomical machines and the lifelike statues that were made to his specifications by fellow masons. San Severo’s cabinet continued a time-honoured tradition in Naples and throughout the Italian peninsula of private academies and personal

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museums; this created a rich landscape for the polycentric Italian eighteenth century, in which hundreds of minor figures participated. (Franco Venturi touched on these intellectual contributions in his panoramic overview of Iluminismo in Settecento Riformatore, and they have yet to be fully explored.) Enlightened nobles sought the erudition of learned men, whom they welcomed into palazzi equipped with extensive libraries, laboratories, and cabinets of curiosities. Such individual spaces were increasingly placed at the service of the state as sites of intellectual exchange and advancement in the Kingdom of Naples, where the university system struggled to keep abreast of developments in northern Italy, England, France, and Holland and where the academies played a strong role.9 Indeed, conditions in the kingdom fostered numerous private/public exchanges, which for the Neapolitan intellectual class had become one of the only means of recapturing the kingdom’s former glory as a flourishing site for the cultivation of the arts and sciences.10 Naples native Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, one of Galileo Galilei’s foremost disciples, documented the establishment of one such private/public space for scientific exchange in his dedication to Andrea Concublet, marquis d’Arena, when he presented him with a copy of his newly published De Motionibus naturalibus a gravitate pendentibus (1670). In the noblest city of Naples, my native country, you have created in your Museum a society or Academy in which, by way of fervent discussions, philosophical truths could be researched for the good of the Republic of Letters. You did this with great solicitude and generosity, gathering together the most famous and most learned men … the likes of Tommaso Cornelio, Francesco D’Andrea, Leonardo Di Capus, Luca Antonio Porzio and innumerable others.11

Borelli was referring to the salon-type activity that would eventually lead to the creation of the Accademia degli Investiganti (Academy of Researchers/Scrutinizers), the precursor to Raimondo di Sangro’s Masonic lodge in Naples. From its founding in 1660, the academy welcomed members who had performed speculative activity. It was founded to adjudicate the dispute that had arisen between those whose point of reference was the authority of antiquity, starting with Aristotle, and those who primarily subscribed to the modern scientific method.12 The importance and impact of the academy would wax and wane throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, and it often had to suspend activity due to ecclesiastical pressure, including the threat of the Inquisition’s

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return. The academy performed the important function of connecting Naples with scientific circles outside Italy – in particular, the Royal Society in London. It was revived briefly between 1735 and 1737. It is, therefore, no surprise that the Prince of San Severo, who founded his Masonic lodge in the early 1740s, filled a big gap by providing both a site for the kind of scientific practice that Masons embraced and an opportunity for exchange by corresponding with members residing in other countries. Over the course of the next century, much of Naples’s scientific legacy would be carried out in similar private settings, which would transition to semi-public sites, where a cross-section of citizens convened to pursue scientific work. In the Kingdom of Naples, this is where the practice of knowledge creation and transmission took place; there was no university culture, such as existed in Bologna or Padua, where scientific learning had an institutional profile. University renewal and regeneration was one of the primary goals of the members of the private academies, societies, and Masonic lodges addressed in this study.13 The palazzo and chapel of Raimondo di Sangro, under the vibrant tutelage of its namesake, would become one of the most important of these sites. Di Sangro’s case determines how a particular set of cultural and historical practices, tied to a specific geographical, political, and urban reality, characterized the way scientific enquiry was conducted and the products it yielded, but also the consequences. Di Sangro’s career was emblematic of a growing group of Neapolitan noblemen who sought to become agents of reform and innovation, operating as both catalyst and buffer between themselves and the Crown, the antiquated feudal nobility of privilege, the Church, and the masses, who were in dire need of the benefits of a modernized state. An able and powerful networker who hand-picked the best and the brightest in the kingdom to effect change, Di Sangro could boast among his most prized friends and connections Neapolitan academic, philosophe, and political economist Antonio Genovesi, who joined forces with him to promote his cause, while endorsing the intentions and projects he fostered through scholarly publications and translations.14 Nonetheless, Di Sangro also pursued hermeticism, whose roots and traditions, from the time of Giordano Bruno and Lucilio Vanini, ran deep in Naples, a city and kingdom uniquely positioned as a site where all forms of knowledge, including the hermetic, were studied and pursued. Indeed, the illustrious hermetic tradition of Naples has been the source of speculation, suspicion, and condemnation due to a scholarly tradition that until recently placed little value on alternative sources of

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knowledge – in particular, the transfer and reception of such knowledge within the modern scientific tradition.15 One example of this tradition is a man who embodied the natural science tradition of his age, the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista Della Porta, whose European reputation for expertise in astrology, alchemy, magic, mathematics, optics, meteorology, chemistry, distillation, numerology, ciphers, physiognomy, and phytognomy was unmatched.16 Fascination with ancient traditions and alchemical pursuits continued to flourish in Naples in tandem with rational, objective enquiry, as we have already stated. In reality, the practice of the alchemical and the scientific coexisted in spaces where strong traditions of erudition and collection coalesced into new forms of scientific and fraternal sociability in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over the past thirty years, scholarship on the Enlightenment in the German and Italian states has begun to seriously consider this nexus. No longer the object of speculation and innuendo, Freemasonry has emerged as being central to our understanding of the practice of enlightenment and its transmission throughout Europe.17 The following section avails itself of this research, drawing connections that are now possible to establish more definitively.

Di Sangro’s Masonic Activity in Naples and Parallels in the German States: Masonic Ambition, Masonic Inspiration Raimondo di Sangro’s European network was forged through Freemasonry. Although the first Masonic lodge in the Italian states had been established in Florence in 1737 among the heavily British community assembled around Horace Mann and his Italian friends, that lodge can best be described as a gentleman’s club, meeting to pursue artistic and antiquarian endeavours.18 Di Sangro’s thriving Neapolitan lodge, on the other hand, boasted far bolder origins and a more diverse set of relationships and members, not to mention the fact that it was located in southern Italy. Di Sangro’s inspiration came from contacts with Masonic organizations and their members in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland; moreover, his lodge can be described as Protestant-leaning in nature, which would ultimately heighten Catholic suspicion about its subversive nature. (The Catholic backlash against him came rather late because of his close ties with Benedict XIV and Charles III, and his profile as a contributing citizen to the Kingdom of Naples in both military and intellectual affairs also protected him from closer scrutiny for a number of years.)19 The role of Freemasonry in Di Sangro’s evolving image of

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himself and what he saw as his destiny cannot be underestimated, nor can the vision shared by important members in his Masonic network. After his lodge closed in 1751 and political and religious machinations forced him to switch from public to private pursuits, the coherence between image and destiny remained completely intact, although the means by which he communicated changed from publication to the representation of Masonic beliefs in experiments, anatomical models, sculpture, and guarded communication through Masonic networks. In his day-to-day life in Naples, Raimondo di Sangro embodied the salon model of sociability. His home became the locus for the exchange of ideas at a moment when reforming Neapolitan institutions informed the discussions of an emerging elite of citizenry and after Charles of Bourbon had become “the resident monarch of an autonomous kingdom.”20 Judging from the list of members of his lodge, he thoroughly adhered to the notion of accepting men from all strata of society, and this reveals his roots in operative Freemasonry.21 In fact, it has been speculated that he first experienced operative Freemasonry in Belgium during a trip to Flanders, probably in the late 1730s or early 1740s. By “operative Freemasonry,” we are referring to the movement as it emerged out of the guilds of bricklayers and those who laboured physically to build society. Few Masonic lodges had retained their operative designation after the Grand Lodge of London was founded as a speculative lodge in 1717, with the result that the original connection with building morphed into a predilection for philosophical speculation (always carried out, however, with the intention of aiding society). Yet Di Sangro, following in the footsteps of his friend Felice Gazzola (whom he had met on the battlefield of Velletri, where both had been commended for their service), joined an operative lodge in London, the Grand Lodge of England.22 The two of them then opened a small outpost of the English lodge in Naples, and Di Sangro was nominated as a venerable of that lodge. In 1751, when the operative and speculative lodges in England merged, a full-fledged southern lodge was established in Naples, the Primaria Gran Loggia Nazionale, and Di Sangro was elected as its first Gran Maestro. While the Prince of San Severo would certainly embrace the speculative tenets of Freemasonry in later years, his conception of the craft always retained an artisanal element. It blended with the speculative to create an esoteric artisanry, which guided his oversight of the construction of his anatomical machines and of the sculpture of the lifelike marble statues that grace the family chapel, both of which have engendered years of speculation about the materials used to construct them. Both sculptors, Antonio Corradini and Giuseppe Sanmartino, were members of his

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lodge, sharing his vision and ideas for the statues, which were meant to be as lifelike as possible. Almost without exception, every member of Di Sangro’s lodge practised an activity that can be described as operative, while matching material creativity with speculative reason. This aspect of his Masonic work links Di Sangro to the German lodges, which we will discuss later in this essay, whose members often engaged in laboratory experiments as a principal function of lodge gatherings. Di Sangro’s early role in Neapolitan Freemasonry has left a number of tangible examples of this operative phase. Scholars have had difficulty fitting these examples into their conception of Masonic activity, but when they are considered in their Masonic, transnational perspective, they can be interpreted as part of a larger Masonic discourse, one that adds significantly to our understanding of the position Di Sangro envisioned for himself within Europe. The many substances, objects, machines, and military configurations he invented and memorialized in both concrete and published form are as dizzying in their quantity as they are in their variety and genius. They also find resonance in Desaguliers’s A Course of Experimental Philosophy, which described any number of machines that could improve the quality of life by easing physical labour, such as the steam engine and wooden railways.23 Among them, we note Di Sangro’s military inventions, including a lightweight cannon with a longer range than those in use at that time, his ideas about fortifications, and his recognized brilliance in infantry formation, as described in works such as his Pratica più agevole e più utile di esercizi militari per l’Infanteria scritta da R. di S. Principe di S. e Colonnello del Reggimento di Capitanata in virtù del Real dispaccio del 17 settembre 1746 per Segreteria di Stato e Guerra e dalla propria Sacra Persona del Re benignamente esaminata ed approvata nel dì 22 novembre dello stesso anno (A more useful and manageable practice of military exercises for the infantry written by R. di S. Prince of S. and Colonel of the Capitanata Regiment by virtue of the royal dispatch of 17 September 1746 by the Secretary of State and War, by his own Sacred Persona the King benignly examined and approved on the 22nd of November in the same year) (Naples 1747). This work was greatly appreciated by leaders who waged war, among them the Marshall of Saxony, who used it to train his troops, and Fredrick the Great of Prussia, who in 1747 wrote the prince a letter brimming with admiration and gratitude for his contributions to the military arts and science.24 The para-textual material in these works is also of great interest, for it demonstrates the breadth of the prince’s contacts.25 Freemasons in eighteenth-century Europe sought new forms of knowledge by exploring unusual sources and knowledge pathways about energy,

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life, and the life force. Spruit discusses the many echoes in Di Sangro’s thought, which he describes as being essentially vitalistic, but also open to Newtonianism, albeit in a cultural, political, and social way, and he positions it in a more far-reaching context than the technical one in which it is usually understood. Spruit also underscores the southern philosophical tradition in the mix, commenting that “in its entirety, it [the new science represented by Di Sangro] stood in striking contrast with the doctrines of the Catholic church.”26 While we might tend to think of Masonic activity as being conducted in secret, Di Sangro instead sought to make Freemasonry’s doctrines of fraternity and pursuit of knowledge public in an effort to galvanize Neapolitan society and recruit as many interested parties as possible to take up the mantle with him. In this sense, his scientific work coheres perfectly with the importance attributed to science by Freemasons in Germany, whom Andreas Önnerfors has been documenting in his recent work. The concept of science occupies a prominent place in the imagination of freemasonry; not only the Constitutions of Anderson (1723) make frequent references to “arts” and “sciences” as expressions of theoretical and applied modes of knowledge, they return over and over again in ritual performance as much as within normative texts such as Masonic charges and orations.27

Önnerfors’s research on science in German Freemasonry contains numerous interesting parallels with Raimondo di Sangro’s scientific activity and experimentation in the German states. Önnerfors has written extensively about Masonic dioramas, which portray the inner workings of those lodges. The dioramas, he notes, demonstrated a significant innovation in print culture because the press on which they were printed was capable of producing multiple colours and elaborate designs, all in the first half of the eighteenth century (1737–50). Di Sangro also printed in colour on what is often referred to as a printing press of his own design.28 The printing of the dioramas by the German lodges is traced to the brothers Martin (1684–1756) and Christian Engelbrecht (1672– 1735), engravers who sold prints in Augsburg. The connection between Di Sangro and the German states certainly passes through Freemasonry, for in addition to the unique capability of colour printing to which both lay claim, one of the Engelbrecht dioramas is of particular interest because it depicts a Masonic lodge in which the members are engaging in scientific experimentation, not secret, arcane rituals.29 The description of the laboratory bears an uncanny resemblance to how Di Sangro’s La Fenice laboratory has been described, and it sheds

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light on the shared sociable, scientific vision that Freemasonry embodied and its applied dimension – i.e., the “sciences” applied as “arts.”30 In addition to garnering the recognition of Frederick the Great, Di Sangro’s skill in these pursuits earned accolades from Frederick the Great’s sister, Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine, Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. In his Voyage d’un François en Italie, Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande discusses the many experiments that Di Sangro performed – in particular, his invention of a substance that was indistinguishable from lapis lazuli, a piece of which he gave to the Margravine. It seemed impossible to distinguish it from true lapis, it has the same hardness, the same weight and the same golden veins as lapis. The Prince told me that the Margravine of Bayreuth to whom he had given a slab, had it tested by her Chemists when she returned to Germany and that she had acknowledged that nitric acid removed its luster in the same way that it removed the luster of true lapis and that it calcinated instead of melting under the enamler’s lamp, which proves that it is not simply colored glass. He also succeeded in creating a mastic or stucco that is much harder then the Lastrica that is used to pave the apartments and terraces of Naples and is not subject to the same cracks and crevices.31

In Di Sangro’s last will and testament, he bequeathed to his wife, Princess Carlotta, a precious tobacco box that he had received as a gift from the “Margravia di Bareith,” offered in all likelihood as a token of her appreciation for his gift of the manufactured lapis lazuli. We do not know whether the two actually met or whether the exchange was made through friends or the mail. However, thanks to Lalande’s recounting of the Margravine’s delight over the gift of ersatz lapis lazuli, we do know that they were in direct contact. We find ties between Di Sangro and Berlin and Di Sangro and Berne through Masonic brothers who were honorary members of Di Sangro’s lodge. One was the architect, painter, and captain of the Prussian army Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, whom Frederick the Great hired as the superintendent of his palaces and gardens. The many projects he realized for the king included the expansion of the Charlottenburg Palace, the restructuring of the Tiergarten, and the design of Frederick’s Potsdam residence, Sans Souci. Di Sangro and von Knobelsdorff corresponded regularly, exchanging ideas about their building projects, which for the prince, consisted primarily of his work on the family chapel.32

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Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice, the protégé of Di Sangro who joined his circle and his lodge, according to Castiglione, presents one of the most interesting cases of religious heterodoxy. He was brought to Naples from Rome and immediately entered Di Sangro’s Masonic circle as well as the group of intellectuals, spearheaded by Antonio Genovesi, with whom he facilitated the university reform effort of transitioning instruction from Latin to Italian. De Felice held the temporary position of professor of ancient and modern geography at the Università de’ Regi Studi in Naples as well as the chair of experimental physics and mathematics, and he became translator and editor of the miscellanea, Sceltà de’ migliori opuscoli, which offered in Italian translation treatises of important men of letters and science.33 Although only one volume was published, the contents are highly indicative of the kind of learning that was being made accessible: Maupertuis’s Lettres sur le progrès des sciences, Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, and a curious selection, not from French but from Latin – the Discorso istorico-critico del chiarissimo Vincenzo Viviani sulla vita e ritrovati del sig. Galileo Galilei – one that was certainly made to remind the Italian students that Galileo, an Italian, had launched the new age of science. Just as important is De Felice’s preface, which fully addresses the need to spread the arts and sciences in Naples in order to “promote those Arts and Sciences that best serve the public good and human society.”34 De Felice told in his autobiography of the criticisms he had engaged in with Di Sangro over the religion that the priests taught and the need to reject both the teachings and the practices of the Catholic Church. Here he refers to Di Sangro as the most learned man he had ever met.35 De Felice also translated from English into Latin John Arbuthnot’s 1733 An Essay Concerning the Effect of Air on Human Bodies.36 Di Sangro surely promoted this publication because, among other things, it addressed the effects of the air on the blood, which is something in which he had a vested interest, as we shall see in the next section.

San Gennaro’s Blood One of the first things that any visitor notices about Naples and its natives is the preponderance of men named Gennaro, after the patron saint of the city. The second thing they learn is the belief in the “miracle” of San Gennaro, the martyred fourth-century bishop. This superstition, bordering at times on hysteria, compels the population of the city to gather every year to witness the liquefaction of his blood, preserved in two vials.

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This so-called miracle brings the faithful together twice a year: on 19 September, the saint’s feast day, and on the first Sunday in May, in commemoration of the day that his body was brought back to Naples. While the saint’s skull and the vials of his blood had been sporadically displayed to churchgoers throughout the centuries, the cult of San Gennaro reached its zenith on 16 December 1631. During the worst eruption of Vesuvius since 79 AD, ash, fire, and lava had taken some three thousand lives and threatened to wreak even more havoc on the city. In desperation, a priest raised the skull and blood of San Gennaro up to the fiery mountain, when, it is told, a ray of light appeared through the raining ash, and the smoke began to clear. The blood liquefied, and the eruption ceased.37 This purported miracle of Naples, saved from the lava of Vesuvius, coincided with the arrival of the first visitors on the Grand Tour. And while it had been documented since the Middle Ages, it was now reported, debunked, and defended in the copious Grand Tour literature by enlightened British and French travellers, who were drawn to Naples as much by the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum as they were by the opportunity to observe the Miracle of San Gennaro and who later wrote about the fanatical reaction of the people. The representation of the liquefaction underwent a significant change between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, dependability was the hallmark of the event, proof of God’s unflagging presence and role in maintaining the safety of Naples. In the eighteenth century, the Church focused on the unreliability of the event so as to emphasize its status as miracle and to undermine any attempt to define it as the normative performance of nature.38 Through Grand Tour lore, the miracle became a much cited and ridiculed event throughout Europe, breaking along lines that can be considered Protestant-scientific and Catholic-superstitious. Di Sangro, as “protector of the blood” on the one hand and Masonic, alchemistic, and scientific seeker of knowledge on the other, sits precisely at the crossroads of the debate and is therefore invoked in relation to the miracle by those who knew him through their Masonic connections. Before addressing his attempts to explain the miracle, let us cite a few events that attest to the status of the miracle, both in Naples and elsewhere. There is no better way to demonstrate the divide separating the Protestant and Catholic views of the miracle of San Gennaro’s blood than to compare two events that referred to it in 1734, one that took place in Naples and the other in Berlin. The 1789 Elogio estemporaneo per la gloriosa memoria di Carlo III monarca delle Spagne e delle Indie, written by Pietro Degli

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Onofri in memory of Charles III, tells of the day in 1734 when the king first arrived in Naples. Degli Onofri recounts how, on that glorious day, the sea, earth, and heavens aligned to mark the auspiciousness of the occasion; however, a single, portentous sign stood out above all the rest: the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s “prodigious blood,” which in subsequent years “was never again seen” in a state as “vivid, vermillion, and fluid” as it was that day.39 While the vitality of the blood served as a portent of Charles III’s salubrious effect on the kingdom, a re-enactment of the miracle in Berlin conveyed a very different sort of message. On 25 January 1734, Caspar Neumann, royal apothecary, performed the miracle of San Gennaro’s blood before an illustrious audience of the president, directors, and members of Fredrick the Great’s Academy of Sciences in an ostentatious display of mock religious solemnity. In his role as the priest, he handled the blood-filled vials next to the saint’s skull on the feast day of San Gennaro.40 Neumann knew that his performance would delight his audience, which was familiar with the ways of Naples and had certainly read about the miracle of San Gennaro through word of mouth or in travel literature. Montesquieu, for example, had written about the miracle in his Voyages, and although the Voyages were not found and published until the nineteenth century, Montesquieu often documented it and made numerous reflections on it in his travel writing. He reveals both that it was a well-known event to be experienced when in Naples, one that he was sure to not miss, and that it provoked serious thinking – about the scientific reasons for which the blood might liquefy, the clergy’s need to believe in the miracle, the political ramifications of the miracle, and, finally, its place in the lives of Neapolitans and their entire belief system.41 Moreover, thanks to the writings of the marquis d’Argenson, we know the extent to which Montesquieu discussed his travels among his friends.42 Two travel accounts concerning Naples from the 1750s and 1760s refer specifically to Di Sangro. One is by the Lausanne pastor Gabriel Mingard, who went on to write controversial articles addressing questions about life and the afterlife for the Protestant Encyclopédie d’Yverdon (1770–80), the other by renowned French astronomer and Freemason Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande. Mingard’s account was published in the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon article “Polythéisme” in 1774, although it references the trip he took to Naples in 1756, while Lalande’s appeared in his seven-volume Voyage d’un François en Italie (1766).43 Lalande’s work was a bestseller throughout Europe even though it had been written in an

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encyclopedic style. In strikingly similar prose, both writers condemned the so-called miracle but also the persecution of Di Sangro by the ecclesiastical authorities for his experiments in producing artificial blood. This confluence of mock experimentation and outraged commentary over Catholic fanaticism reveals how knowledge was transferred through intellectual networks from north to south by like-minded individuals, who opened up lines of scientific communication using a number of different genres – encyclopedia entry and travel account or the relations, or Jesuit accounts. But what can be said about the prince himself, his experimentation, his role as an official protector of the blood, and his own writings on the subject? The Lettera apologetica, to which we have referred a number of times, contains a long digression about the miracle of San Gennaro, the prince’s observations about it as one of its trusted protectors, and his enquiries into the physical properties of blood and the causes of liquefaction. There have been a variety of interpretations of his decision to describe his experiment, some of which downplay its controversial nature and claim that it was merely the work of a curious mind, which could in the same space contemplate both the miraculous and the scientific. However, the prince’s record as a pantheistic believer who denigrated the Church numerous times makes it difficult to position his experiment as anything but a debunking of the miracle, written in his magnum opus as a positive response to the northern Protestant view of the event. Lalande, who devoted an entire volume of his Voyage to Naples, describes how the prince created an amalgam of gold and mercury to demonstrate what might have been going on in those vials. And while Lalande casts a rather sceptical eye on much of what he sees, lamenting the erosion of the anticlerical tradition of the seventeenth century, he has nothing but praise for the prince, whom he mentions once again in his account before leaving Naples. I have already spoken about the Prince of San Severo, whose palace I have described; one would be hard pressed to find anywhere a better prince, or maybe even a better academician who is more well-versed in physics or the arts than he.44

For Lalande, Di Sangro’s chemical research offered a solid basis for his anticlericalism. The miracle of San Gennaro was exactly the kind of instrument of ecclesiastical control to which Di Sangro’s protégé, De Felice, had referred when he wrote of the need, in relation to Di Sangro’s milieu, to reject the practices of the Church. In the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon,

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the ultimate project intended to promote the arts and sciences throughout Europe, De Felice, now converted to Protestantism, expresses his frustration about the travesty of a Catholic Church that continues to exploit its believers through the miracle in his article on Naples. “Great God! Does your holy religion really need its priests to perform such trickery?”45 In his Lettera apologetica, Di Sangro offers a scientific explanation for the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood as a way of rehabilitating the image of Neapolitans, who, he believes, have a reputation for being a superstitious people in the estimation of the rest of Europe. What is more, he provides his readers with a finely honed explanation of the cultural phenomenon engendered by the miracle so that they might better understand the effect that the miraculous appearance of the liquefied blood has on the believers who witness it year after year. Di Sangro’s anthropological observations are keen, and it is easy to understand the impact on De Felice and the intellectual charisma on which his European following was based.46

The Anatomical Machines and the Experiments in Di Sangro’s Cabinet The anatomical machines may well constitute the most tangible product of Di Sangro’s legacy from the time they first occupied a coveted place in his private laboratory. (Named “La Fenice,” it was constructed under the family chapel.) Alluding to the regenerative powers of the Phoenix, he stated that these machines symbolized his goals for his laboratory and what he hoped to achieve by taking the experiments that had led to their creation many steps further. The machines were two preserved cadavers, one of a man and one of a woman. For years, it was believed that Di Sangro had created chemical substances and injected them into the cadavers’ venous, arterial, and lymphatic systems to simulate bodily fluids. Indeed, it had become the stuff of legend. Today, these cadavers are on display in twin niches carved into the plaster at the Cappella di San Severo, a favourite tourist spot, and are one of the site’s main attractions. In 2003, Lucia Dacome and Renata Peters were granted access to the cadavers to determine how they had been constructed; this was the result of a research agreement reached between the Wellcome Institute in London and the Cappella di San Severo to answer the many questions raised by Di Sangro’s anatomical machines.

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While popular and scholarly treatments of the machines allude to the prince’s direct participation in creating them as well as his underground laboratory, a far more nuanced picture emerges when one explores the context of medical study and training in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. Dacome and Peters rightfully challenged the macabre legend surrounding these machines. While their article describing the history and construction of the cadavers is an important piece of archival and scientific research, it does not address the context – i.e., the interest and expertise in embalming injections in the eighteenth-century Kingdom of Naples.47 These cadavers were, in fact, created by Domenico Giuseppe Salerno, an anatomist from Palermo who had studied under Giuseppe Mastiani (1715–56), an anatomist trained by the Parisian anatomist of Danish origin, Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, in the art of anatomical modelling in wood and the science of injecting the venous and arterial systems of corpses with lifelike fluids of preservation.48 Thus, Di Sangro himself played no role in creating the cadavers, but, having carried out experiments on the human body for years, he clearly understood the value of the knowledge and academic traditions that underpinned their construction. And he wanted Salerno to demonstrate his techniques in La Fenice.49 Such experimental spaces were the most significant places for anatomical research, and anatomists equipped their homes with the necessary instruments for carrying out dissections, vivisections, and chemical experiments. It is possible, therefore, that Di Sangro had set up better scientific working conditions than were available at the university, although his lack of formal training as an anatomist would certainly cast suspicion on his work. Di Sangro attempted to simulate and recreate bodily fluids, particularly blood (something he had already done in his alchemical experiments with the blood of San Gennaro). His laboratory was fully equipped with the tools of the alchemist’s trade, including a special oven, similar to the one used by glass-blowers but of a construction that allowed for a number of adjacent ovens “with reverberating fire”; next to the oven room, he set up a “chemical laboratory with every sort of burner and glassware or equipment for any kind of operation.”50 We can imagine that the laboratory looked much like the one depicted in the Masonic dioramas discussed earlier. We know that creating anatomical machines, constructing lifelike wax models, and carrying out experiments in preserving cadavers abounded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and certain areas of the

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Italian peninsula were particularly fertile areas for such experimentation. In addition, the long-standing history and reputation of the universities of Bologna and Padua in anatomy and autopsy drove the experimentation and dissemination of scientific results throughout Europe. But other sites, albeit less renowned than San Severo’s cabinet, elicited interest and awe. The outcomes of their experiments were far less mainstream, perhaps, but they were followed, nonetheless, over networks of knowledge transfer that deserve more in-depth research.51 Wax modelling for teaching purposes was a highly valued art in Bologna, where, not surprisingly, Salerno wished to send his anatomical machines and where a lucrative career might have awaited him. (A very different type of modelling was practised in Palermo because of the research tradition passed down by Winslow.) Freemasonry developed strong roots in Naples for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its philosophy of improving society through knowledge building, knowledge transfer, and fraternity; this was a thoroughly appealing proposition throughout Italy and Germany, where the political organization of city states and kingdoms rather than nations fostered collaboration among government officials, nobles, and aristocrats. Masonry was a boon and a support, establishing conditions for innovation outside the traditionally corrupt power structures of Church and state. One of the major themes of Masonic research was the preservation of life, the understanding of the tenuous relationship between life and death. This research was intrinsically linked by alchemical practice and was often carried out in parallel fashion in lodges scattered throughout Europe, as Önnerfors’s research on the Masonic dioramas has shown. Three letters written by Cardinal Gianvincenzo Antonio Ganganelli (later Pope Clement XIV) to Di Sangro from 1751 to 1757 offer surprising insight into our knowledge of the prince’s alchemical experiments.52 The letters express admiration and support for these experiments during the same years in which Benedict XIV placed the Lettera apologetica on the Index for its esoteric content and especially for its use of maligno gergo (“evil jargon”), or the language Di Sangro used to describe his alchemical work and its meaning. Di Sangro tried to defend his position in the Supplica, explaining why his language and experiments were neither esoteric nor evil, but to no avail. However, the letters from this prominent Cardinal demonstrate the interest that Naples and her rambunctious son had elicited; they are also indicative of how widespread and accepted alchemical practices were, in tandem with the experimentation of the rational sciences.

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In the first letter, Ganganelli thanks Di Sangro for his help with a friend. He then praises Naples as the best place for the man of letters to exercise his craft, thanks to the kingdom’s water, fire, stones, mountains, and caves, all of which “instill the desire to examine them.” The second letter praises Buffon’s natural history and the prince’s experiments in the same breath. The third letter is the most explicit in its admiration and recognition of Di Sangro’s work in alchemy: Ganganelli acknowledges that the prince is capable of “creating a second world from the first,” but he expresses concern for his safety. “I always fear that your chemical experiments will be harmful to your health, because at times, terrible accidents have been known to happen.”53 It is ironic that Di Sangro may have indeed caused his own death, as well as those of others at his court, through the very experiments he conducted and the substances he created to preserve life and/or to regenerate it; contemporary accounts report noxious fumes issuing from under the chapel. Lalande tells of four alchemical experiments that the prince told him about, but that he had not personally witnessed. He was nonetheless sufficiently persuaded to list them in the Voyage: (1) a natural and real palingenesis of plants and animals, regenerated from fennel ash, (2) extremely slow burning of wood and carbon that left no residue, (3) a special paper for ammunition that created no sparks when burned, and (4) the “perpetual lamp,” which Lalande wrote about in his letters to the Abbé Nollet. He describes any number of other substances, including a sort of silken thread made from vegetable fibres, amalgams of all sorts that perform better than marble and rock, and an impermeable, lightweight fibre used to construct Charles III’s redingote.54 We know, from Peter Reill’s research on the science and culture of death and dying, that the late eighteenth-century belief that people could be brought back from the dead and restored to life traces its origins to that moment mid-century when mechanism could offer only a repetitive and ultimately empty response to the question of life and death. The human spirit, in need of new answers, sought vitalistic experimentation in a belief, like the one expressed by the future Pope Clement XIV, that a new world could be wrought from the first.55 Surely the prince was searching for those occult life forces that Reill refers to when he talks about Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, or formative drive, responsible for regeneration.56 Today the fascination for the macabre so aptly described by Peter Reill can be experienced on any given day on the faces of the visitors to the Prince of San Severo’s family chapel, now a museum, where the two ana-

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tomical models stare out, their venal, arterial, and lymphatic systems fully visible, appearing alive with their original bodily fluids. Above the former laboratory where the anatomical models reside, the veiled marble Christ of Sanmartino offers the viewer yet another version of the macabre, that of external perfection – albeit veiled by the thinnest of marble “cloths,” reminding us of our mortality. Taken together, the lifelike models and statue present a dialogue of the macabre, the inner-outer bodies, truly “created anew,” which encourage the viewer to contemplate both the horror and the possibility of eternal life that inspired the alchemical pursuits of the Prince of San Severo and so many like-minded seekers in eighteenth-century Europe.

NOTES 1 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 29–30. 2 See Leen Spruit, introduction to Supplica a Benedetto XIV, by Raimondo di Sangro, ed. Leen Spruit (Naples: Alòs, 2006), 10. 3 Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4 Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, I fari di Halle: Georg Ernst Stahl, Friedrich Hoffmann e la medicina europea del primo Settecento (Bologna: il Mulino, 2009), 499. 5 See the documentary appendix of Leen Spruit, ed., to Lettera apologetica dell’Esercitato accademico della Crusca, contenente la difesa del libro intitolato Lettere d’ una peruana per rispetto alla supposizione de’ Quipu scritta alla Duchessa di S… e dalla medesima fatta pubblicare (Naples: Alòs, 2002), especially those pages listing his library holdings, 262–9. 6 M. Della Monica, D. Galzerano, S. Di Michele, F. Acquaviva, G. Gregorio, F. Lonardo, F. Sguazzo, F. Scarano, D. Lama, and G. Scarano, “Science, Art, and Mystery in the Statues and in the Anatomical Machines of the Prince of Sansevero: The Masterpieces of the Sansevero Chapel,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 161, no. 11 (2013), 2920–9. 7 Spruit, introduction to Supplica, 12. 8 In 1751, he published Montfaucon de Villars’s Le comte de Gabalis, an important text that explained the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the world. It was published as Il Conte di Gabali: Ovvero Ragionamenti sulle scienze segrete tradotti dal Francese da una dama italiana a’ quali si è aggiunto infine Il Riccio Rappito; Poema del Signor Alessandro Pope, with the false imprint of London. It was placed on the Index in 1752.

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9 See Elena Chiosi, “Intellectuals and Academies,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 118–34. 10 See John A. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), for a thorough treatment of Naples’s status in the seventeenth century and the conditions that preceded the establishment of Masonic lodges there. 11 Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, quoted in Raffaello Caverni, Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia, vol. 1 (Florence: Stabilmento G. Civelli, 1891), 205–6: “Tu ipse es gli scriveva qui in praeclara Urbe Partenopaea mea parente societatem seu Academiam in tuo Museo erexisti in qua certis et indubitatis experimentis non vero inanibus ac rixosis disputatiunculis philosophicas veritates ad Reipublicae litterariae bonum indagarentur idque summa cura ac munificentia praestitisti in unum collectis clarissimis doctissimisque viris Cara muele Thoma Cornelio Francisco De Andrea Leonardo Capua Luca Antonio Portio innumerisque aliis.” See also Luciano Boschiero, “Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679),” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 21 of Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany: The History of the Accademia del Cimento, chap. 3 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 1, 59–91. 12 Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Klewer, 2000). 13 Franco Venturi, ed., Riformatori napoletani (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1962). 14 The best summary of Antonio Genovesi’s role as modern innovator in the Neapolitan university can be found in the biographical article by Maria Luisa Perna, “Antonio Genovesi,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 53, 2000, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-genovesi_(DizionarioBiografico)/. 15 Sigfido E.F. Höbel, Il Fiume segreto: Testimonianze della tradizione ermetica a Napoli (Naples: Stamperia del Valentino, 2004). 16 David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 72. 17 See Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Grand Tour,” “République des Lettres,” and “Reti massoniche: une cultura della mobilità nell’Europe dei Lumi,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 21: La Massoneria, ed. Gian Mario Cazzaniga (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2006), 32–49; Andreas Önnerfors, “Secret Savants, Savant Secrets: The Concept of Science in the Imagination of European Freemasonry,” in Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, ed. André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 433–58; and Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, 2nd rev. ed.

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19 20

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(Lafayette, LA: Cornerstone, 2006), especially chap. 4, “The Origins of European Freemasonry.” See Clorinda Donato, “Where ‘Reason and the Sense of Venus Are Innate in Men’: Male Friendship, Secret Societies, Academies and Antiquarians in Eighteenth-Century Florence,” Italian Studies 65, no. 3 (November 2010): 329–44. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 82–3. The phrase is from Melissa Calaresu, “Searching for a ‘Middle Class’? Francesco Mario Pagano and the Public for Reform in Late EighteenthCentury Naples,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Ashgate: Surrey-Burlington, 2009), 63–82; citing 66. See R. di Castiglione, Alle sorgenti della Massoneria (Rome: Atanòr, 1988) for a description of Di Sangro’s lodge and full biographies of its members. They represent an impressive cross-section of the most productive and innovative members of Neapolitan society from every privileged and professional walk of life. Ibid., 43. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 105. See Raimondo di Sangro, Gran Vocabolario dell’Arte Militare di Terra 1742; Lettera apologetica 1751; Supplica 1753; Lettres écrites par Monsieur le Prince de S. Sevère de Naples à Monsieur l’Abbé Nollet de l’Accadèmie de Sciences à Paris contenant la relation d’une découverte, qu’il a faite par le moyen de quelques experiences Chimique, avec l’explication Phisique de ces circonstances, Premier partie (Naples: Joseph Raimondi, 1753); La Dissertation sur une lampe antique Trouvée à Munich en l’année 1753 écrite par Mr. le Prince de St. Sévère: Pour server de suite à la prémière partie de ses Lettres a Mr l’Abbé Nollet à Paris, sur un decouverte qu’il a faite dans la Chimie avec l’explication Phisique de ses circonstances. See Di Sangro, Lettres. Throughout his work on the eternal light, he makes several references to contacts and colleagues in Dresden, Berlin, and Bayreuth. Leen Spruit, ed., Raimondo di Sangro: Lettera apologetica (Naples: Alòs, 2002), 304 (“il tutto comunque in eclantante contrasto con le dottrine della Chiesa cattolica”), 40. Andreas Önnerfors, “Extending the Horizon: How to Bring the Study of Freemasonry Further,” Zeitschrift für Internationale Freimaurerforschung 32 (2014): 32–55; citing 34–5. Spruit, Raimondo di Sangro: Lettera apologetica, 26. Andreas Önnerfors, “Illuminism,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (Oxford: Routledge), 173–81.

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30 Alessandro Coletti, Il Principe di San Severo (Naples: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1988), 74–6. 31 Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, Voyage d’un François en Italie, fait dans les années 1765 & 1766 …, 7 vols. (Yverdon, 1769–70), 6:247: “Il paroît impossible de le distinguer du veritable Lapis, il a la meme dureté, le meme poids & les veines dorées du Lapis. Le Prince m’a dit que la Margrave de Bareith à qui il en avoit donné une lame, l’avoit fait éprouver par les Chymistes à son retour en Allemagne, & qu’elle avoit reconnu que l’esprit de nitre lui ôtoit le lustre comme au veritable Lapis, & qu’il se calcinoit au lieu de se fonder à la lampe de l’émailleur, ce qui prove que ce n’est point du verre coloré. Il est parvenu aussi à faire un mastic ou stuc beaucoup dûr que la Lastrica dont les appartemens et les terrasses de Naples sont pavées, & qui n’est pas sujet aux lézards et aux crevasses.” 32 Castiglione, Alle sorgenti della Massoneria, 35–6. 33 Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice, Scelta de’ migliori opusculi, Discorso accademico del sig. di Maupertuis sul progresso delle scienze. Dissertazione del sig. Renato Des-Cartes dul metodo. Discorso istorico-critico del chiarissimo Vincenzo Viviano sulla vita e ritrovati del sig. Galilei Galilei (Naples, 1755). 34 Ibid., x. 35 Eugène Maccabez, F.B. de Félice, 1723–1789 et son Encyclopédie (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1903). Maccabez quotes directly from the manuscript of the autobiography, which he saw but has never been found since. 36 John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies [Specimen edfectuum aëris in humano corpore. Quod primum ex anglico idiomate interpretatus est gallico Clar. Boyerus … Mox vero latine reddidit, atque additionibus, auctariisque illustravit, ornavit, auxit P.F. Fortunatus de Felici] (Naples: Joseph Raymundi, 1753). 37 Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (London: W.W. Norton, 2005), 146–8. 38 Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, “Thinking with the Saint: The Miracle of Saint Januarius of Naples and Science in Early Modern Europe,” Early Science and Medicine 19, no. 2 (2014): 133–73. 39 Pasquale Palmieri, I taumaturghi della società: Santi e potere politico nel secolo dei Lumi (Rome: Viella, 2010), 188–9. 40 See De Ceglia for a more thorough discussion of the anonymous Relation du miracle de la liquéfaction du sang à l’imitation de celuy qui se pratique à Naples au sang prétendu de St. Janvier (Berlin: Hall, 1734). 41 Don Desserud, “Reading Montesquieu’s Voyage d’Italie as Travel Literature,” in Promenades autobiographiques: Autobiographical Journeys, ed. Servanne Woodward and Jeremy Worth (London, ON: Mestengo Press / University of Western Ontario, 2001), 1–39.

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42 René-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’Argenson, Essays, Civil, Moral, Literary & Political (Worcester, MA: Thomas, Son & Thomas, 1797). 43 Gabriel Mingard, “Polythéisme,” in Encyclopédie d’Yverdon (Yverdon: Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice), 34:258–64; and Lalande, Voyage, 6:176. 44 Lalande, Voyage, 6:234: “J’ai déjà parlé de M. le Prince de San Sevère en donnant la description de son palais; on aurait de la peine à trouver ailleurs un prince, peut-être meme un academicien, plus habile dans la physique et dans les arts.” 45 Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice, “Naples,” in Encyclopédie d’Yverdon (Yverdon: Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice), 30:45: “Grand Dieu ! votre sainte religion a-t-elle besoin de pareilles fourberies de prêtres?” 46 See Raimondo di Sangro, Lettera apologetica dell’Esercitato accademico della Crusca, contenente la difesa del libro intitolato Lettere d’ una peruana per rispetto alla supposizione de’ Quipu scritta alla Duchessa di S… e dalla medesima fatta pubblicare (Naples, 1775). For the discussion of the blood of Saint-Janvier, see 90–5. 47 Lucia Dacome and Renata Peters, “Fabricating the Body: The Anatomical Machines of the Prince of Sansevero,” in Objects Speciality Group Postprints, vol. 14, ed. Virginia Green (Washington, DC: Objects Speciality Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 2007), 161–77. 48 Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort, trans. Jacques-Jean Bruhier (Paris: Morel, le jeune, 1742). 49 Raffaella Cioffi Martinelli, La Cappella Sansevero: Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, 2nd ed. (Salerno: Edizioni 10/17, 1994). 50 This information has been culled from Sigfrido E.F. Höbel, Il Fiume segreto: Testimonianze della Tradizione Ermetica a Napoli (Naples: Stamperis del Valentino 2004), 111–12. Höbel extracted this information from the biography of San Severo written by Giangiuseppe Origlia, Istoria dello Studio di Napoli, in cui si comprendono gli avvenimenti di esso più notabili da’ primi suoi principj fino a’ tempi presenti, con buona parte della Storia Letteraria del Regno (Naples, 1753). Translation from Origlia mine. 51 Rebecca Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Mazzolini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 52 Gianvincenzo Antonio Ganganelli, Lettere ed altre opere di Clemente XIV Ganganelli (Florence: Giuseppe Molini all’insegna di Dante), 1823. 53 Ibid., vol. 1, letter 101, 372–5.

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54 Lalande, Voyage, 6:247–9. 55 Peter Hanns Reill, “Death, Dying, and Resurrection in Late EighteenthCentury Science and Culture,” in Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750–1900, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Peter Hanns Reill, and Jürgen Schlumbohm (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 255–74. 56 Ibid.

chapter ten

The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël H E L E N A RO S E N B L AT T

Madame de Staël is often described as embodying a contradiction. She is regarded as both an Enlightenment rationalist and an instigator of romanticism. On the one hand, it is said, she was an intellectual committed to openness, critical enquiry, and progress – a founder, no less, of modern liberalism – but, on the other, she was prone to emotional effusiveness and was attracted to the occult. Although permeated by Enlightenment clarity, she was drawn to the obscure. Those who speak of Madame de Staël’s mysticism invariably refer to two summers at her home in Coppet, near Geneva, in 1808 and 1809, when she hosted mystic luminaries like Madame de Krüdener, Zacharias Werner, the chevalier de Langallerie, and François Gautier de Tournes. She read Fénelon, Madame de Guyon, and the hermetic philosopher SaintMartin, who she later described as a man with a “superior mind” who wrote books containing “glimmers of the sublime.”1 Some members of Madame de Staël’s entourage became quite alarmed. Referring to the summer of 1808, one friend wrote in desperation to another, “Nothing has changed more than Coppet – you will see, these people are turning into Catholics, Boehmists, Martinists, mystics!”2 But there were other mystic moments as well. In 1802, Madame de Staël admitted to a friend that she might have become a mystic early in her life upon reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She found mysticism “so attractive to the heart” and thought it “the most precious treasure that Christianity [had] brought to the earth.”3 Then there is her book, On Germany, published in 1813, with its famous chapters on enthusiasm and mysticism, and a letter written in 1815, in which she once again referred highly favourably to mysticism, saying that it “united what was best in Catholicism and Protestantism” and that it was the form of religion that best suited, and served, a liberal political system.4

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Embarrassed by what they see as these repeated, yet isolated, flirtations with mysticism, some biographers choose to ignore them altogether, while others are quick to point out that Madame de Staël never fully succumbed. Renée Winegarten writes that “she became interested in mysticism … but remained uncommitted.”5 Ghislain de Diesbach remarks that although Madame de Staël frequented various types of mystics, she never fastened on any one of them, “passing from quietists to pietists, to followers of Swedenborg to those of Saint-Martin, … led more by intellectual curiosity than by real sympathy for doctrines whose vagueness and sometimes ridiculousness did not fool her for long.”6 The author of a full-length article on Madame de Staël’s mysticism finds it surprising that such a “virile woman” should have “taken refuge” in a “sterile dreamworld,” but concludes that she somehow remained a woman of the eighteenth century.7 It is often said that Madame de Staël found mysticism consoling on a personal level and that she turned to it during moments of emotional crisis; but, as such accounts suggest, she eventually returned to her senses. And, as Pierre Kohler writes, she always kept her distance from “real mysticism.” Her soul was “sensitive,” but remained “reasonable.” Deep down in her, there was an “unrepentant rationalism.” “The priestess of enthusiasm, the victim of furious passions does not seem ever to have abandoned herself to the delights of divine love.”8 Male critics of her time tended to ascribe Madame de Staël’s contradictions – her rationalism and her mysticism – to the fact that she was that most bizarre and unnatural of creatures, the female intellectual. Byron famously said, “She thinks like a man, but alas! She feels like a woman.” Lamartine described her as having a “male genius trapped in a female body.”9 Another explained that the “virile force of her mind did not stop her from experiencing the weakness of the female heart.”10 Some modern scholars have preferred to speak of mental illness. Francine du Plessix Gray writes that she suffered from bipolar disorder,11 while Michel Winock suggests that she had a split personality, characterized by “lucidity” on the one hand and “tears” on the other, adding that “her tendency towards extremes” displays the “marks of hysteria.”12 In this paper, I would like to suggest that these scholars are missing the point. Madame de Staël’s emotionalism and mysticism – which I do see as linked – should not be dismissed as mere aberrations, or embarrassing contradictions, in her otherwise rational thought or as evidence of feminine frailty, confusion, or illness. Rather, I shall suggest that they should be seen as her deliberate effort to mediate between extremes, to represent in her own person – and also to advocate – the reconciliation

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of opposites in the pursuit of a higher truth, social and political harmony, and progress. This embrace of diverse, although intersecting and interacting, paths to the good and true was an integral part of Madame de Staël’s liberalism and not somehow outside of it or contrary to it. Nor was this in any way a departure from her Enlightenment values, at least not in her own mind. We now know, of course, that the so-called Age of Reason was also an age of sentiment and that there were even important currents of mysticism running through it.13 Madame de Staël’s combined rationalism, sentimentalism, and mysticism might therefore be better seen as an effort to revive ways of thinking “erased” (to use William Reddy’s term)14 during the French Revolution. I would also like to propose that Madame de Staël’s sense of herself as an extraordinary woman, a person who thought like a man but felt like a woman, played a crucial role in the formulation of this ideal and in the agenda she set for herself. Some see Madame de Staël’s rationalism and irrationalism not so much as a constant contradiction or tension in her thought, but as a chronological sequence, a movement from an originally enlightened, rationalist position to a romantic or mystic one later on.15 They argue that her early writings, up to and including the novel Delphine (1802), display a preference for a rationalist deism characteristic of the Enlightenment, but that by the time she wrote Corinne (1807), her second novel, she had embraced a new kind of spirituality, a more sentimental and emotional variety, celebratory of “religious enthusiasm” and the “affections of the soul.”16 In Corinne, they note, Madame de Staël was even willing to praise superstition, such as when the heroine remarks, “I find an indefinable charm … in everything that is religious, even superstitious, [as long as] there is nothing hostile or intolerant in this superstition.”17 In between writing these two books, they also note, she had visited Germany and been transformed there by conversations with Schlegel, Goethe, and Humboldt, who introduced her to a new world of thought and feeling. Thus, according to Auguste Viatte, whose book The Occult Sources of Romanticism has the merit of taking her mysticism seriously, Madame de Staël was a “person of the 18th century” until her trip to Germany in 1804.18 Even so, the abdication of her Enlightenment credentials was neither immediate nor smooth, as a letter from Schiller to Goethe testifies. “She wants to explain everything, to clarify, understand, measure: she will accept nothing obscure; she is also horribly frightened of idealist philosophy which, in her mind leads to mysticism and superstition.”19 But then, a slow progression is said to have occurred, helped along by that

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famous mystic summer at Coppet, during which she supposedly abandoned the rationalism of her youth. By the time On Germany appeared in 1813, the transformation in Madame de Staël’s thought is said to be very visible, especially in its famous chapters on mysticism and enthusiasm and, for example, in its praise of Saint-Martin. Once again, though, it is noted that she never seems to have fully assimilated German thought and never quite accepted the new German concepts. Scholars have debated whether she misunderstood them or wilfully distorted them. As John Isbell writes, Madame de Staël manipulated the Germans’ thought, always maintaining her own “fierce independence.”20 The comtesse de Pange, who focuses on Madame de Staël’s relationship with Wilhelm Schlegel, notes that she argued intently with him. As was the case with mysticism, Madame de Staël appears to have gone to the water’s edge, but refused to jump in. The renowned de Staël scholar Simone Balayé attributes this reticence to Madame de Staël’s “fidelity to the Enlightenment [which] preserved her from the most advanced positions of the German romantics.”21 In any case, German critics found her treatment of their philosophy superficial and misguided.22 Once again, the argument was proffered that her gender was to blame. Calling her an “intellectual amazon,” John Paul Friedrich Richter accused Madame de Staël of “castrating” her sources23 and denounced her supposedly naive misinterpretations as typical of the female tendency to reduce intellectual concepts to mere feelings. To Heinrich Heine, also, the fault of the book was not so much Madame de Staël’s but that of her sex.24 Richter’s remarks were particularly nasty, and Madame de Staël would certainly have perceived them as such. But I am not altogether convinced that she would have minded being described as someone who thought like a man and felt like a woman. Moreover, those who said this were, in a way, on to something important. Madame de Staël was very well aware that she was no ordinary woman; she no doubt felt exceptional.25 And to the frustration of many modern feminists, she seems to have accepted the eighteenth-century gendering of reason as masculine and many, if not all, of the medical and ideological notions of womanhood that sustained it.26 Recent scholarship has brought to light what constituted the “science” of the age when it came to women’s “nature.”27 According to Pierre Roussel’s best-selling treatise, Système physique et moral de la femme (1775), the organs of women were more delicate than men’s, while their muscles and nerve fibres were finer and weaker. This made women particularly

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susceptible to impressions and to all of the “gentle passions” that Roussel believed were crucial to society, such as tenderness, compassion, benevolence, and love. But it also meant that women could not develop strong powers of reflection. They were easily distracted and unfit for long and profound meditations, abstract thinking, and any real intellectual profundity.28 Antoine Léonard Thomas (1732–85), a frequent visitor to Madame de Staël’s mother’s salon, agreed about the “natural weakness” of women’s organs and that it made them more sensitive to “all the affectionate and sweet [or gentle] passions.”29 This same sensitivity caused the “disquiet of their characters,” “the variety and multitude of the sensations to which they were prone,” and indicated why women were more religiously inclined, and less rational, then men. It explained why their minds were always closer to enthusiasm than men’s, exhibiting a “tendency toward superstition.”30 Such ideas of womanhood were confirmed by others. According to the ideologue Pierre Cabanis (1757–1808), women were simply “incapable of fixing their attention long enough on one thing, they cannot feel the lively and profound pleasures of a deep meditation.… They go rapidly from one subject to another and retain only partial, incomplete notions that almost always form the strangest combinations in their heads.”31 Sustained thinking and full intellectual development were thought to require manly sensibility, a strong will, and physical fortitude. The Montpellier physician Pierre-Edmé Chauvot de Beauchêne (1780–1830) argued that because of the sensitivity of their internal organs and the more rapid movements of their nerve and muscle fibres, the equilibrium of women was more easily upset. They were susceptible to a number of nervous diseases – the vapours, melancholia, migraine, and monomania – a compelling reason to keep them away from “the dangerous labors involved in intense study.”32 Women were naturally unsuited for – and indeed incapable of – “sweeping views of politics,” “great principles of ethics,” and the “scientific erudition” that should be the province of only the best male minds.33 One can only wonder what such ideas could have done to an intellectually inclined young woman like Germaine de Staël, but it seems likely that it confirmed the idea she had of herself as an exceptional creature – a woman set above the rest – because she combined masculine and feminine qualities to an unusual degree. Through her very contradictoriness, then, she might personify an ideal, the avenue to a higher truth, and even the solution to many of society’s problems. Madame de Staël held

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within herself masculine and feminine forces – rational ones, sensitive or sentimental ones, and, as she was prone to notice and demonstrate, mystic ones as well. It is not surprising that her very definition of genius involved an equilibrium of opposite qualities: “opposite qualities,” she clarified, but not “qualities that develop at the expense of one another.” Rather, they were enriched by their contrast and combination: “gaiety of mind and melancholy of the heart, energy and delicacy, precision and imagination.”34 This kind of equilibrium – this union of contrasting qualities – was extremely rare, but she saw them in her father, and she saw them also in Rousseau, who, as she explained in her earliest publication, united in one person “the purest heart and the strongest soul,” “profound sentiments” and “vast ideas,” “heat” and “moderation,” “reason and passion,” “natural instinct,” and “reflection.”35 Thus, when Madame de Staël wrote in the conclusion of On Literature (1799), considered by scholars her most rationalist work, “I cannot separate my ideas from my feelings,”36 this is not a confession of a flaw or failure on her part, or proof of some kind of confusion; it is the proud expression of an agenda. It is what makes her a genius and a perfect exemplar of the reconciliation of opposites. In all that she did and wrote, Madame de Staël protested against what she saw as reductionist or what she also called “fanatical” thinking, whether in politics, philosophy, religion, or, one might add, epistemology. The truth came from diverse and, moreover, intersecting and interacting paths, whether it be the emotions, reason, or even the above- or beyond-reason. Rational deliberation on its own was never enough, and pure sensationalism was not enough either; rather, the emotions, reason, and the above-reason had to be combined and held in creative tension, as they were in Madame de Staël. In On Literature, Madame de Staël emphasized the many positive ways that emotion affects reason and judgment. Writing in the aftermath of the Terror, she denounced the “atrocious men” who “simplified” reflection, reducing it to mere “calculation,”37 and thus resorted to “measuring, counting, weighing,” while ignoring “sufferings, sentiments, imagination.” This is why women were not just valuable in society, but why they also brought a crucial dimension to politics. For the health of the polity, a balance was necessary between female emotions and male rationalism. “Women,” she writes, “are the ones who animate everything relating to humanity, generosity, delicacy.”38 In her Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (posthumously published in 1818), she wrote similarly that during

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the Terror, men lost their hearts and ability to feel. Political dogmas were, tragically, allowed to reign at the expense of love and friendship. Robespierre, she noted, “was incapable of personal views,” while Napoleon was devoid of affection.39 In between the publication of these two books, Madame de Staël wrote On Germany, the work that supposedly testifies to her estrangement from the Enlightenment, but that once again is marked by a desire to reconcile opposite – some would say contradictory – sources of truth and knowledge. This can especially be seen in her use of “bridging concepts,”40 such as, for example, enthusiasm, a concept that, in de Staël’s writings, links and encourages the creative interplay among reason, emotion, and the above- or beyond-reason. Her notion of enthusiasm is exemplary of the epistemological ecumenism that she hoped to foster and that she thought was needed to promote reconciliation and progress in an enlightened and liberal society.41 It should be said that in the famous fourth section of On Germany, entitled “Religion and Enthusiasm,” Madame de Staël repeatedly praises and defends the Enlightenment (i.e., “lumières”) and its “spirit of enquiry,” but also praises and defends religious sentiment and what she refers to somewhat interchangeably as “enthusiasm,” “mysticity,” or “the sentiment of infinity.” There is clearly no contradiction in her mind between rational thought and religious sentiment. In fact, free enquiry and religious enthusiasm, reason and mysticism, work together in Madame de Staël’s mind. She writes, for example, that during the Protestant Reformation (which she always describes favourably), free enquiry gave impetus to religious enthusiasm, while enthusiasm is always “very favorable to thought and imagination.”42 They stem from twin human needs. There is in human nature, she writes, two distinct yet cooperating forces: a need to believe and a need to examine.43 Both must be satisfied for there to be peace in the human heart and progress in society. In 1795, she had already written that real enthusiasm must be a part of reason, since it is the heat that develops it. Could there be an opposition between two natural qualities of the soul …? When it is said that reason is unreconcilable with enthusiasm, it is because calculation is taken for reason, and madness for enthusiasm. There is reason in enthusiasm and enthusiasm in reason every time that both arise from nature and no measure of affectation has entered in.44

Similarly, rationalism and sensationalism or materialism work together in Madame de Staël’s mind. It was wrong, she suggested, that the rationalists

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and the materialists of her day were working against each other, the former believing that it was only by ridding oneself of all sense impressions and engaging in pure thought that one could understand nature, while the latter alleged the opposite, “as if the human mind needed to liberate itself from the body or the soul to understand nature, when it is in the mysterious reunion of the two that the secret of existence consists.”45 Moreover, both rationalism and materialism pointed to yet another realm of importance – namely, that of the beyond. While human beings experience what de Staël called a “natural sentiment of infinity,” which moves them to recognize something mysterious and grand beyond themselves, one of the very purposes of the spirit of enquiry was to know its own limits – and to “recognize what is superior to reason.”46 Here again, then, the human faculties, whether it be the senses or reason, cooperate and, moreover, suggest something valuable beyond themselves. “Sentiment goes further than knowledge.… Beyond demonstrative proofs there is natural evidence,” writes Madame de Staël, “and beyond analysis, inspiration, beyond words, ideas and beyond ideas, emotions,” adding that “the sentiment of infinity is a fact of the soul, a primitive fact, without which there would be nothing in man but physical instinct and calculation.”47 Both mysticity – to which Madame de Staël devotes a chapter in On Germany – and the sentiment of infinity, to which she devotes several paragraphs – are, similarly, bridging concepts that link and encourage the interplay between emotions or sensations, reason, and the realm beyond. Madame de Staël defines mysticity in one place as a “religious disposition,” which is merely “a more intimate manner of feeling and conceiving Christianity” (NB the reference to both feeling and conceiving). The sentiment of infinity is a feeling that encourages an idea and, in this regard, is both conducive and receptive, she writes, to enthusiasm. Neither is in any way opposed to the Enlightenment or to “reason” in Madame de Staël’s mind. The sentiment of the infinite is the real attribute of the soul: everything that is beautiful (in any category) excites in us the hope and desire of an eternal future and a sublime existence; you cannot hear either the wind in the forest or the delicious harmony of human voices, you cannot experience the enchantment of eloquence or of poetry; and lastly, especially, you cannot love with innocence, with profundity, without being penetrated by religion and immortality. Any sacrifice of personal interest comes from the need we feel to put ourselves in harmony with this sentiment of the infinite whose charm we feel even though we can’t express it.48

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Madame de Staël may very well have borrowed the idea of the sentiment of infinity from Frédéric Ancillon (1767–1837), an author whom she cites favourably and summarizes briefly in her chapter on religion in On Germany.49 Born in Berlin, Ancillon studied theology at the University of Geneva and was afterwards appointed minister to the French Protestant community in Berlin. In 1803, he published a highly acclaimed history entitled Tableau des révolutions du système politique de l’Europe depuis le XVème siècle. And in 1809, he published Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie, which Madame de Staël read and admired. Ancillon’s thoughts shed light on Madame de Staël’s intellectual context and project or agenda. “Nothing is more dissimilar,” writes Ancillon, than German and French literature. The French are empiricists, while the Germans are rationalists. For the French, knowledge comes from the senses alone, while for the Germans, it comes from “pure reason.” But both systems, he argues, are the result of the exaggeration of one principle at the expense of the other. Each system is only half true. What is needed is for someone to mediate between the two, to serve as a “philosophical interpreter.” Finally, neither system can account for something as essential and positive in man as what Ancillon calls the “sentiment of infinity.”50 Even though it is neither observable nor measurable, the sentiment of infinity is an incontestable “psychological fact.” Human beings are finite creatures; their understanding is circumscribed. Nevertheless, they sense – or feel – that the infinite exists, even if they cannot understand it. The sentiment of infinity, Ancillon goes on to say, is never hostile to “positive knowledge” or science, but gives rise to a very healthy and, Ancillon makes sure to say, “legitimate” kind of mysticism that has a number of benefits and advantages. It moderates man’s sensuality and combats egoism. It expands man’s existence, giving him the conscience of his grandeur.51 This, I would argue, is what Madame de Staël refers to as “mysticity” – perhaps trying to coin a new word for it. She is eager to distinguish it from “charlatanism”; the use of “initiations,” visions, and prophesies; “white magic”; “bizarre reveries”; and the “secrets of alchemists, magnetizers and illuminists,” these latter being errors made by people who believe that “the soul is stronger than nature.”52 What she advocates is something different: an intimate, ennobling sentiment that is an antidote to fanaticism and selfishness and that encourages generosity and compassion. To conclude, I would like to return to where I began – namely, the question of Madame de Staël’s dualism, her supposedly split personality,

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and the question of whether she belongs to the Enlightenment or to romanticism. The “problem” is obviously at least partly due to a misunderstanding of the Enlightenment. Thanks to much recent work, we now know that the Enlightenment was not just an age of reason but also an age of sensibility53 and of the emotions. And thanks to Dan Edelstein’s work on the super-Enlightenment, Charly Coleman’s on the discourse of dispossession, and especially to Peter Reill’s work on Enlightenment vitalism, we can understand that Madame de Staël was, in fact, trying to mediate among currents within the Enlightenment. It is to this, much richer, Enlightenment that Madame de Staël belongs.54

NOTES 1 Simone Balayé, ed., Madame de Staël: De l’Allemagne, vol. 2 (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1967), 266. 2 Ch. V. de Bonstetten to Frédérique Brun, Coppet, 12 October 1809, cited in Pierre Kohler, Madame de Staël et la Suisse (Lausanne: Payot, 1916), 347, 483. 3 Charles de Lacretelle, Testament philosophique et littéraire, quoted in J. Billion, “Madame de Staël et le mysticisme,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 1 (1910): 107. 4 Letter of 17 September 1815 to Madame Gérando, quoted in Georges Solovieff, Madame de Staël, ses amis, ses correspondants (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 514. 5 Renée Winegarten, Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 220. 6 Ghislain de Diesbach, Madame de Staël (Paris: Perrin, 1983), 447. 7 J. Billion, “Madame de Staël et le mysticisme,” 107. 8 Pierre Kohler, Madame de Staël et la Suisse (Paris: Payot, 1916), 346–7. 9 Byron and Lamartine cited by Madelyn Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 288, 280–1. 10 Charles de Lacretelle, Testament philosophique et littéraire, vol. 2 (Paris, 1840): 69. 11 Francine du Plessix Gray, Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman (New York: Atlas, 2008), 133. 12 Michel Winock, Madame de Staël (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 14. 13 The scholarship on Enlightenment sentimentalism is now vast. See, e.g., David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Anne Vincent-Buffault,

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

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Histoire des larmes: XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Rivages, 1986); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, esp. 199–208. Whether Madame de Staël evolved from a position of rationalism to one of romanticism is debated. In Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (New York: Grove Press, 1958), J.C. Herold claims that she displayed a rationalist outlook in On Literature, which she abandoned in On Germany only to return to it in the Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (published posthumously in 1818). John Isbell dismisses the notion of a conversion or even a progression towards mysticism after her trip to Germany or the mystic summer of Coppet, noting that Madame de Staël’s affinities for mysticism began earlier; see John Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s “De l’Allemagne,” 1810–1813 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Simone Balayé, ed. Madame de Staël: Corinne ou l’Italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 271. Ibid., 402. Auguste Viatte, Les Sources occultes du romantisme, vil. 2 (Paris: Champion, 1928), 96. Friedrich Schiller, quoted in Solovieff, Madame de Staël, 252. Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism, 156. Balayé, introduction to Madame de Staël: De l’Allemagne, 22. In Madame de Staël, Solovieff surveys some of her German criticism in his first chapter. Eduard Berend, ed., Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, Section 1 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1938), 16:325, cited by Margaret Higonnet, “Madame de Staël and Schelling,” Comparative Literature 38, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 160. Heinrich Heine, Geständnisse, in Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 7:103–6, cited by Margaret Higonnet, “Madame de Staël and Schelling,” 160. Mary Sheriff’s The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) provides insights into Madame de Staël as well. For two contrasting views of de Staël’s feminism, see Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist, 295–301; and Mary Trouille, “A Bold New Vision of Woman: Staël and Wollstonecraft Respond to Rousseau,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292 (1991): 293–336.

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27 See, e.g., Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ludmilla Jordanova, “Sex and Gender,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995): 152–83; and Anne Vila, “‘Ambiguous Beings’: Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 53–69. 28 Pierre Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme (Paris: Vincent, 1775.) On Roussel, see, in particular, Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998): 225–57. 29 Antoine Léonard Thomas, Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles (Amsterdam, 1777): 94, 115. 30 Ibid., 111. 31 Pierre Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1805), quoted in Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman, 23. 32 Roussel, 101. 33 Ibid., 75. 34 Quoted by Simone Balayé, “Le génie et la gloire dans l’oeuvre de Mme de Staël,” Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 20, no. 3–4 (September– December 1967): 202–14; on Mme de Staël's notion of genius, see also Vila, “‘Ambiguous Beings.’” 35 Madame de Staël, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau, 1788, first letter. 36 Madame de Staël, Oeuvres complètes de Mme la baronne de Staël, vol. IV (Paris: Treuffel et Würtz, 1820), 573. 37 Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink, eds., Madame de Staël: De la littérature (Paris: Flammarion, 1991): 376, 374. See Lori Jo Marso, “The Stories of Citizens: Rousseau, Montesquieu, and de Staël Challenge Enlightenment Reason,” Polity 30, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 435–63. 38 Gengembre and Goldzink, Madame de Staël: De la littérature, 336. 39 Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008): 373. 40 For an excellent discussion of “bridging concepts,” see Ludmilla Jordanova, introduction to Languages of Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), from which I take the term. 41 Recently, Steven Vincent has made a compelling argument for the importance of enthusiasm to Madame de Staël’s social and political views; see K. Steven Vincent, Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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42 Balayé, Madame de Staël: De l’Allemagne, 306. 43 Ibid., 257. 44 Madame de Staël, quoted in Lidia Breda, ed., Madame de Staël: De l’influence des passions suivi de Réflexions sur le suicide (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2000): 299. 45 Balayé, Madame de Staël: De l’Allemagne, 283. 46 Ibid., 247. 47 Ibid., 240. 48 Ibid., 239. 49 Ibid., vol. 2, part 4, chap. 1. 50 Frédéric Ancillon, Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie, vol. 1 (Paris, 1809): vii, xix, 14. 51 Ibid., 36, 43. 52 Pierre Deguise provides some valuable insights in a comparison of Madame de Staël’s and Benjamin Constant’s mysticism in “Les chapitres de De l’Allemagne sur ‘La religion et l’enthousiasme’ et De la Religion de Benjamin Constant,” in Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 20, no. 3–4 (September–December 1967): 177–85. 53 To the works listed in note 13 above could be added G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 54 Charly Coleman, Dispossessing the Self: Mystics, Materialists, and the Secret History of the French Enlightenment (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming); Dan Edelstein, The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010); and Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

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Contributors

Keith Michael Baker is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities and professor of early modern European history (and, by courtesy, French) at Stanford University. He received his MA from Cambridge University and his PhD from University College London. Before moving to Stanford, he taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he served for almost a decade as co-editor of the Journal of Modern History. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. He is a former president of the International Society for EighteenthCentury Studies. His many publications include Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (1975) and Inventing the French Revolution (1990). Clorinda Donato is the George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and professor of French and Italian. She has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques and has published extensively in her fields of encyclopedism and the Enlightenment in Italy and Ibero-America. Her co-edited volume, Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities, was published in 2014 by University of Toronto Press in the UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Enlightenment Spain and the Encyclopédie méthodique (co-edited and -translated with Ricardo López) appears in the 2015 Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Renko Geffarth is a historian and chemist who, after earning his PhD, was a researcher with the group The Enlightenment in the Referential

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Contributors

Context of Modern Esotericism at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at Halle University from 2004 to 2012. He is currently working at the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina as an editor in science communications. He has published on the early modern history of religion, the history of secret societies in early modernity, and the history of science. Jenna M. Gibbs is associate professor of history at Florida International University. Her research focuses on the intersections among culture, politics, and imperial expansion in the long eighteenth century. She is the author of Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760s–1850s (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and related articles. She is currently writing her second monograph, Evangelicalism and Empire: The Global Latrobe Family, 1750s–1850s, which is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. Her fellowships include the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Martin Gierl is currently a fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at Göttingen. He has published extensively on the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially Pietism and the German Enlightenment, including Pietismus und Aufklärung (Vandenhoeck, 1997), Geschichte und Organisation (Vandenhoeck, 2004), and, more recently, Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Frommann-Holzboog, 2012). His current project is studying the development of specialized scientific journals and languages in the eighteenth century. His main interest is understanding how science and, more generally, history has operated as a process of institutionalization. Annette Graczyk earned her PhD in German and comparative literature before working as a researcher at the University of Marburg, the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle. Her publications include an anthology of drama during the French Revolution (Vorhang auf für die Revolution: Das französische Theater 1789–1794, 1989); a study of the representation of crowds in literature (Die Masse als Erzählproblem, 1993); an edited volume, Das Volk: Abbild, Konstruktion, Phantasma (The People: Image, Construction, Phantasma, 1996); Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft (The Literary Tableau between Art

Contributors

249

and Science, 2004); and, most recently, a study of the eighteenth-century discourse on hieroglyphics (Die Hieroglyphe im 18. Jahrhundert: Theorien zwischen Aufklärung und Esoterik, 2015). Her current research focuses on artificial ruins and fragments in the eighteenth century. Avi Lifschitz is senior lecturer in European intellectual history at University College London. He is the author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Voltaire Foundation, 2009). He has recently edited Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and a special issue of History of Political Thought (2016) on Rousseau and classical antiquity. Research fellowships have included the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen, and the Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journal German History and the database e-Enlightenment. Frédéric Ogée is professor of English literature and art history at Université Paris Diderot. His main areas of research are eighteenth-century aesthetics, literature, and art. He has published two collections of essays on William Hogarth and in 2006 curated the first-ever exhibition on Hogarth for the Louvre. Among his recent publications are “Better in France?” The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the 18th Century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006, reissued 2009), and J.M.W. Turner: Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010). His current projects include a monograph and an exhibition on the Scottish Enlightenment and France in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and the Yale Center for British Art. Kris Pangburn is a former doctoral student of Peter Reill’s. After earning his PhD, he taught at Colorado College and more recently at Santa Monica College in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a study of how Enlightenment thinkers in German-speaking Europe explored issues related to the self and individual difference in the context of their debates about life after death. Helena Rosenblatt is professor of history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract 1749–1762 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

250

Contributors

(Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the coeditor with R. Geenens of French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 2012) as well as, with Paul Schweigert, Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Her current manuscript-in-progress is A History of Liberalism with Princeton University Press. John Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research focuses on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his student and rival, Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as on the history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. His current research involves the gestation of biology as a special science in Germany in the eighteenth century. His key publications are The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abhandlung von der Physiognomie, Metoposcopie und Chiromantie (Peuschel), 154 Abraham, 56 Abriss der Chronologie (Gatterer), 23 Academy of Sciences (Paris), 110 Academy of Sciences and BellesLettres (Berlin), 45, 46, 57, 62, 221 Accademia degli Investiganti, 212–13 Accademia della Crusca, 211 Adam, Adamic, Adamite, 51, 181 Adanson, Michel, 60 Addison, Joseph, 96 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 62, 219; Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, 219 Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (Herder), 167 Amos (prophet), 50 Analysis of Beauty, The (Hogarth), 6, 96, 102–3 Ancillon, Frédéric, 241; Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie, 241; Tableau des révolutions du système politique …, 241

Anderson, James: Constitutions of the Free-Masons, 181, 183, 217 Anfangs-Gründe der hebräischen Accentuation (J.D. Michaelis), 49–50 Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’, 24 Apollo, Apollo of the Belvedere, Apollo Pythius, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 194 Arbuthnot, John: An Essay Concerning the Effect of Air on Human Bodies, 219 Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’, 221 Aristotle, Aristotelian, 71, 136, 161, 172, 212; Physiognomika, 161 Artois, comte de, 110 “Atlas 1” (Gatterer), 25 “Atlas 2, Kleine Special-Chärtchen” (Gatterer), 33 At the Three Globes (Masonic lodge, Berlin), 183 At the Three Golden Keys (first Masonic lodge, Halle), 183–4, 186, 188–9, 194, 198, 199, 200

252

Index

Aussichten in die Ewigkeit (J.C. Lavater), 163, 173, 175n2 Autobiography (J.S. Mill), 133, 135 Bacon, Francis, 28, 71 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 78 Baker, Keith Michael, 130 Balayé, Simone, 236 Bardi, Girolamo, 24 Baridon, Michel, 6–7, 96 Baumgarten, Siegmund Jakob, 185, 190, 207n100 Beauchêne, Pierre-Edmé Chauvot de, 237 Before and After (Hogarth), 7, 101, 102–3 Beiser, Frederick, 73, 74, 76, 140 Benedict XIV (pope), 210, 214, 225 Bentham, George (son of S.), 132, 133 Bentham, Jeremy; Benthamism, 132, 137 Bentham, Samuel (brother of J.), 132, 133 Beschreibung von Arabien (Description of Arabia) (Niebuhr), 54 “Between Mechanism and Hermeticism” (Reill), 71–2 Beurtheilung der Mittel, welche man anwendet, die ausgestorbene hebräische Sprache zu verstehen (Assessment of the means used to understand the dead Hebrew language) (J.D. Michaelis), 51 Bible, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 63, 173, 181, 190, 192. See also Holy Scripture Bibliotheca Universalis (Coronelli), 24 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 75, 78, 144n4, 172, 226

Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 161 Boerhaave, Herman, 159 Böhme, Jacob, 155 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 239 Bonnet, Charles, 10, 113, 162, 164; Idées sur l’état futur des êtres vivants …, 162 Bordeu, Théophile, 121 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso: De Motionibus naturalibus a gravitate pendentibus, 212 Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Margravine of, 218 Brander, Georg Friedrich, 31 Bruno, Giordano, 213 Buache, Philippe, 24, 33 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 172, 226 Burke, Edmund, 107 Buxtorf, Johannes (the elder), 48–9, 55 Byron, Lord, 234 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges, 8, 121, 237 Callenberg, Johann Heinrich, 47 Calvin, John, 159 Camper, Petrus, 171, 172; Über den natürlichen Unterschied der Gesichtszüge …, 171–2 Cappel, Louis, 48–9, 55 Cardanus, Girolamo, 175n8 Carlotta (wife of R. di Sangro), 218 “Caroli Linnaei Classes S. Literae” (Linnaeus), 29 Cassirer, Ernst, 4 Castiglioni, Ruggiero di, 219 Chapel Royal of St James, 54 Characters and Caricaturas (Hogarth), 97, 98

Index Charles III (Charles of Bourbon, king of Spain), 211, 214, 215, 221, 226 Chart of Biography (Priestley), 36 Chladenius, Johann Martin, 56 Chodowiecki, Daniel, 156, 177n28 Cicero, 61 Clarissa Harlowe (Sterne), 97 Clement XIV (pope), 225, 226. See also Ganganelli, Gianvincenzo Antonio Coleman, Charly, 242 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 132 Collected Works (Wolff), 198 Collegium Orientale Theologicum, 47 Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores … (Gatterer), 32 Comte, Auguste, 142 Concublet, Andrea (marquis d’Arena), 212 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 57 Condorcet, Jean Marie Antoine Nicolas, marquis de, 4 Conformity of Nature and Grace, The (Die Uebereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade) (A. Weber), 11, 179, 193–4, 196–8, 199 Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (de Staël), 238–9, 243n15 Constant, Benjamin, 245n52 Constitutions of the Free-Masons (Anderson), 181, 183, 217 Cook, James, 9 Corinne (de Staël), 235 Cornelio, Tommaso, 212 Coronelli, Vincenzo, 24–6; Bibliotheca Universalis, 24; “Cronologia Universale,” 24 Corradini, Antonio, 215

253

Course of Experimental Philosophy, A (Desaguliers), 216 Creation, 161, 162, 167, 168, 173, 181, 192, 193 Creator, 184, 192, 193. See also Eternal Being; God Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft; third Critique) (Kant), 75, 78, 79, 80, 136 “Cronologia Universale” (Coronelli), 24 Cupid, 101 Cuvier, Georges, 80, 89n90, 133, 165 Dacome, Lucia, 223–4 D’Andrea, Francesco, 212 Darwin, Charles; Darwinian, 87n49 Das Erhabene, worzu die Freymäurerey ihre ächten Schüler führet (The Sublime, to Which Freemasonry Leads Its True Students) (A. Weber), 186 Daston, Lorraine: Objectivity, 72 Davies, Paul, 143 “De anno meteorologico fundamentali commentatio lecta d. 18. Nov. 1780” (Gatterer), 32 De Ceglia, Francesco Paulo, 209 De Felice, Fortunato Bartolomeo, 219, 222–3 Defoe, Daniel, 96 Degli Onofri, Pietro, 220–1: Elogio estemporaneo per la gloriosa memoria di Carlo III …, 220–1 Deguise, Pierre, 245n52 De l’esprit (Helvétius), 111 De l’homme (Marat), 110 Delphine (de Staël), 235 Deluge, 181, 182 De Motionibus naturalibus a gravitate pendentibus (Borelli), 212 De re dipomatica libri sex (Mabillon), 28

254

Index

Der unüberwindliche Freymaurer (The Invincible Freemason) (C. Weber), 199 De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones (Lowth), 55 Desaguliers, John Theophilus: A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 216 Descartes, René; Cartesian, 3, 8, 70, 71–2, 97, 112, 126, 128, 197, 219; Discours de la méthode, 219 Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden … (The Propositions of Baron von Leibniz on Monads …) (Leibniz), 194 Deus sive Natura (Spinoza), 76 Di Capus, Leonardo, 212 Diderot, Denis, 8, 72, 113, 121, 123, 168 Diesbach, Ghislain de, 234 Die Uebereinstimmung der Natur und Gnade (A. Weber). See Conformity of Nature and Grace, The Di Sangro, Raimondo, 11, 208–32; Lettera apologetica, 208, 210, 222, 223, 225; Pratica più agevole e più utile di esercizi militari … (A more useful and manageable practice of military exercises …), 216; Supplica, 225 Discorso … sulla vita e ritrovati del sig. Galileo Galilei (Viviani), 219 Discours de la méthode (Descartes), 219 Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie (d’Alembert), 219 “Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals” (Haller), 114 Dixon, Thomas, 128 “Durationem populorum, regnorum, civitatum sistens” (Gatterer), 35 Dürer, Albrecht, 172

Edelstein, Dan, 9, 242; The Super-Enlightenment – Daring to Know Too Much, 9 Eichhorn, Johann Gottlob, 54 Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie, vol. 2 (Gatterer), 37 Election (Hogarth), 97 Elogio estemporaneo per la gloriosa memoria di Carlo III … (Degli Onofri), 220–1 Encyclopédie, 10, 153, 154 Encyclopédie d’Yverdon, 221, 222–3 Engelbrecht, Christian, 217 “Enlightenment Bible,” 6, 46 Epicurus, Epicurean, Epicureans, Epicureanism, 5, 45, 46, 52, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63 Essay Concerning the Effect of Air on Human Bodies, An (Arbuthnot), 219 Essay on the Human Soul, An (Marat), 7, 110, 111–12 Eternal Being, 188. See also Creator; God European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, 9 Eusebius of Caesarea, 22 Ezra, 48, 49 Fall, 163 Fénelon, François, 233 Fielding, Henry, 96 First Book of Moses, 167 First Letter to the Corinthians (Paul), 174 Forster, Johann Georg, 9, 144n4 Foucault, Michel, 73 Four Stages of Cruelty, The (Hogarth), 97 Four Times of Day, The (Hogarth), 97

Index Frances I (emperor), 176n18 Francke, August Hermann, 47 Frederick II (the Great), 45, 62, 172, 216, 218, 221 French Revolution, 9, 110, 235, 238–9 Fridericiana (Halle), 184 Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine. See Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Margravine of Fries, Johann von, 176n18 “From the Critique of Judgment to the Hermeneutics of Nature” (Huneman), 78 Füssli, Johann Heinrich, 10 Galiani, Celestino, 211 Galilei, Galileo, 212, 219 Galison, Peter: Objectivity, 72 Gall, Franz Joseph, 172 Ganganelli, Gianvincenzo Antonio, 225–6. See also Clement XIV Gatterer, Johann Christoph, 4–5, 19–44, 56; Abriss der Chronologie, 23; “Atlas 1,” 25; “Atlas 2, Kleine Special-Chärtchen,” 33; Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores …, 32; “De anno meteorologico fundamentali commentatio lecta d. 18. Nov. 1780,” 32; “Durationem populorum, regnorum, civitatum sistens,” 35; Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie, vol. 2, 37; Linnaeismus graphicus, 30, 40; “Synchronized Overview of All of History” (“Synchronistische Uebersicht der ganzen Historie”), 37, 40; Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa, 26, 35 Gazzola, Felice, 215

255

General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Kant), 193 Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales … (Linnaeus), 29 Genesis, 167 Genovesi, Antonio, 211, 213, 219, 228n14 Gentz, Friedrich von, 145n8 German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, The (Reill), 4 Gibbon, Edward, 4 God, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190–1, 192–3, 194–5, 196, 197, 220, 223. See also Creator; Eternal Being Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 72, 75–6, 79, 87n49, 89n90, 144n4, 145n17, 145n18, 175n6, 235; The Metamorphosis of Plants (Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären), 145n18 Göttingen, University of, 4, 5, 19, 31, 185, 193 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 198 Gräfenhahn, Wolfgang Ludwig, 186 Grafton, Anthony, 9, 20 Grand Lodge, Berlin, 184 Grand Lodge, London (Grand Lodge of England), 180, 184, 215 Gray, Francine du Plessix, 234 Gregory, Frederick, 79 Guizot, François, 142 Guyon, Madame de, 233 Halle, University of, 5, 10, 11, 46, 47, 179, 184–5, 190, 195, 196, 197, 198–9, 200 Haller, Albrecht von, 7, 45, 53–4, 114, 115, 117, 118, 159, 162;

256

Index

“Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals,” 114 Hamann, Johann Georg, 61 Hanegraaff, Wouter J., 9 Hansen, LeeAnn, 82 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 7, 97, 101 Hartley, David, 131 Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants (Hogarth), 97 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 74, 78, 89n90 Heine, Heinrich, 236 Helmholz, Hermann von, 77 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien: De l’esprit, 111 Helwig, Christoph, 24, 25, 26; Theatricum Historicum, 24 Hemmerde, Carl Hermann, 183 Henrich, Dieter, 81 Herder, Johann Gottfried von; Herderian, 4, 6, 46, 61, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79–80, 87n57, 88n78, 89n90, 90n97, 145n17, 148, 167, 168; Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, 167; Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, 148 Hermes, hermetic, hermetical, hermeticism, 9, 12, 71, 154, 181, 182, 208, 210, 211, 213, 233. See also Mercury (Trismegistos) Herold, J.C., 243n15 Herz, Marcus, 144n4 Heyne, Christian Gottlieb, 19–20 Hieronymus (Saint Jerome), 22 Hiram, 182 Hogarth, William, 6–7, 10, 95, 96, 97–8, 99–104, 105, 107; A Harlot’s Progress, 7, 97, 101; A Rake’s Progress, 7, 97, 101; Before and

After, 7, 101, 102–3; Characters and Caricaturas, 97, 98; Election, 97; Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants, 97; Industry and Idleness, 97, 101; Marriage A-la-Mode, 7, 97, 101, 104; Southwark Fair, 100; The Analysis of Beauty, 6, 96, 102–3; The Four Stages of Cruelty, 97; The Four Times of Day, 97; The Marriage Settlement, 101, 104 Hollman, Samuel Christian, 31 Holy Scripture, 189. See also Bible Homer, 50, 159 Hooke, Robert: Micrographia, 95 Horace, 58 Humboldt, Alexander von (brother of W.), 75, 87n49, 127, 133, 144n4 Humboldt, Wilhelm von; Humboldtian, 8–9, 12, 75, 125–49, 235; The Limits of State Action (Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen), 8, 125, 127, 129, 139 Hume, David, 4, 20, 59, 113 Hundert physiognomische Regeln (J.C. Lavater), 176n15 Huneman, Philippe, 77, 78; “From the Critique of Judgment to the Hermeneutics of Nature,” 78; “Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy to the ‘Adventure of Reason,’” 78; Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology, 77 Huth, Caspar Jacob (ed.), Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden … (The Propositions of Baron von Leibniz on Monads …) (Leibniz), 194

Index Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (W. Humboldt). See Limits of State Action, The Idées sur l’état futur des êtres vivants … (Bonnet), 162 Index of Forbidden Books, 208, 225, 227n8 Industry and Idleness (Hogarth), 97, 101 Inquisition, 212–13 Institut de France, 121 Institute of Historical Sciences (Institut der historischen Wissenschaften) (Göttingen), 19–20 Institutum Judaicum, 47 Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies, 9 Isbell, John, 236, 243n15 Jäsche Logic (Kant), 80 Jaucourt, Louis de, 10, 153; “Physionomie,” 153 Jena, University of, 184, 185, 197 Jesus Christ, 22, 39, 163, 173–4, 176–7n28, 179, 195, 226 Johnson, Samuel, 110 Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob: Uhrsachen [sic] des Verfalls der Religion … (Causes of the Decline of Religion …), 196 Kant, Immanuel; Kantian, Kantianism, neo-Kantianism, postKantian, post-Kantianism, 4, 6, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 82, 88n78, 90n97, 136, 173; Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft; third Critique), 75, 78, 79, 80, 136;

257

General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 193; Jäsche Logic, 80; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 80; “On the Residents of the Stars,” 193; Opus postumum, 79; Universal Natural History, 80 “Kant on the History of Nature: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Critical Philosophy for Natural History” (Sloan), 79 Kepler, Johannes, 22 Kiel, University of, 185 Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich, 75, 80, 88n78, 89n90 Kleine Philosophische Schriften (Small Philosophical Writings) (Leibniz), 194 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 159 Knobelsdorff, Georg Wenzeslaus von, 218 Koch, Friedrich Christian, 51 Köhler, Heinrich (trans.), Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden … (The Propositions of Baron von Leibniz on Monads …) (Leibniz), 194 Kohler, Pierre, 234 Königsberg, University of, 80 Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant). See Critique of Judgment Krüdener, Madame de, 233 Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de, 218, 221, 222, 226; Voyage d’un François en Italie, 218, 221–2, 226 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste; Lamarckian, 87n49 Lamartine, Alphonse, 234 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 114, 120; L’Homme machine, 114, 120

258 Langallerie, chevalier de, 233 Lange, Joachim, 199 Lange, Johann Joachim (son of J.), 199 Lavater, Adriaan Gilles (son of J.C.), 171 Lavater, Heinrich (son of J.C.), 168, 176n18 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 10, 153–78; Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 163, 173, 175n2; Hundert physiognomische Regeln, 176n15; Nachgelassene Schriften, 168–9, 170, 176n15; Physiognomische Fragmente, 10, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168–9, 170, 174, 174n1, 175n13, 177n28; Von der Physiognomik, 153, 155, 159, 166, 176n15 Le Cat, Claude-Nicolas, 7, 115–16, 117, 118, 120, 121; Traité de l’existance [sic] …, 115; Traité des sensations et des passions …, 115 Le Comte de Gabalis (Montfaucon de Villars), 227n8 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Leibnizian, 56, 61, 71–2, 74, 76, 127, 136, 138, 145n17, 161, 194, 196; Des Herrn Baron von Leibniz Lehrsätze von den Monaden … (The Propositions of Baron von Leibniz on Monads …), 194; Kleine Philosophische Schriften (Small Philosophical Writings), 194; Monadologie (Monadology), 161, 194 Leipzig, University of, 184 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4 Lettera apologetica (Di Sangro), 208, 210, 222, 223, 225

Index Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (Herder), 148 Lettow, Susanne: Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, 82 Lettres sur le progrès des sciences (Maupertuis), 219 L’Homme machine (La Mettrie), 114, 120 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 19, 165; “Über die Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen,” 165 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The (Sterne), 7, 104–8. See also Tristram Shandy Limits of State Action, The (Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen) (W. Humboldt), 8, 125, 127, 129, 139 Linnaeismus graphicus (Gatterer), 30, 40 Linnaeus, 4, 5, 28, 29, 30, 59–60, 71, 79, 173; “Caroli Linnaei Classes S. Literae,” 29; Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales …, 29 Lips, Johann Heinrich, 156 Locke, John, 109n3 Lohff, Brigitte, 81 Lowth, Robert, 45, 54–5; De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones, 55 Lucretius, Lucretian, 52, 57, 60 Luger, Thomas Christoph, 185 Luther, Martin; Lutheran, 47, 48 Mabillon, Jean: De re dipomatica libri sex, 28 Madai, David Samuel, 184, 194 Mann, Horace, 214

Index Marat, Jean-Paul, 7–8, 110–24; An Essay on the Human Soul, 7, 110, 111–12; A Philosophical Essay on Man …, 7, 110, 112–14, 116–20; De l’homme, 110 Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth), 7, 97, 101, 104 Marriage Settlement, The (Hogarth), 101, 104 Martin brothers, 217 Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg, 9 Mastiani, Giuseppe, 224 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis, 45, 62, 219; Lettres sur le progrès des sciences, 219 Mayr, Ernst, 143 McLaughlin, Peter, 80 Mechanism and Materialism (Schofield), 70–1 Meiners, Christoph, 19 Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie (Ancillon), 241 Mendelssohn, Felix, 61 Ménuret, Jean-Joseph, de Chambaud, 141 Mercury (Trismegistos), 154. See also Hermes Merian, Jean-Bernard, 62 Metamorphosis of Plants, The (Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären) (Goethe), 145n18 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant), 80 Meusel, Johann Georg, 19 Michaelis, Christian Benedict (father of J.D.), 46–7, 49, 52, 56, 65, 185 Michaelis, Johann David, 5–6, 45–69; Anfangs-Gründe der hebräischen Accentuation, 49–50; Beurtheilung der Mittel, welche man anwendet, die

259

ausgestorbene hebräische Sprache zu verstehen (Assessment of the means used to understand the dead Hebrew language), 51; Mosaisches Recht (Mosaic law), 56, 59; Von dem Alter der Hebräischen Vocalen … (On the age of the Hebrew vowels …), 52 Michaelis, Johann Heinrich (great-uncle of J.D.), 47, 49, 52, 56, 65 Micrographia (Hooke), 95 Mill, James (father of J.S.), 131 Mill, John Stuart, 8–9, 133, 134, 135, 125–49; A System of Logic, 134; Autobiography, 133, 135; On Liberty, 8, 125, 131, 135, 136, 139, 243n15 Mingard, Gabriel, 221; “Polythéisme,” 221 Moll Flanders (Sterne), 97 Monadologie (Monadology) (Leibniz), 161, 194 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de, 4, 56, 59, 63, 120, 148, 172, 221; Voyages, 221 Montfaucon de Villars, abbé N. de: Le comte de Gabalis, 227n8 Montpellier, University of, 133 Moreau de la Sarthe, Jacques-Louis: Physiognomy, 178n46 Mosaisches Recht (Mosaic law) (J.D. Michaelis), 56, 59 Moses, 50, 51 Müller, Johannes von, 19 Nachgelassene Schriften (J.C. Lavater), 168–9, 170, 176n15 “Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy to the ‘Adventure of Reason’” (Huneman), 78

260

Index

Nettelbladt, Daniel, 198 Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika, 9 Neuman, Caspar, 51, 221 New Chart of History (Priestley), 36 Newman, William R., 9 Newton, Isaac; Newtonian, Newtonianism, 9, 22, 70, 71–2, 83n6, 101, 109n3, 111, 120, 133, 158, 159, 173, 208, 210, 217; Opticks, 70 Niebuhr, Carsten, 54; Beschreibung von Arabien (Description of Arabia), 54 Nollet, Jean-Antoine, abbé, 226 Nouveau traité de diplomatique …, vol. 2 (Toustain and Tassin), 30 Objectivity (Daston and Galison), 72 Occult Sources of Romanticism, The (Viatte), 235 Oken, Lorenz, 75 Old Testament, 6, 47–8, 51, 52, 63 On Germany (de Staël), 12, 233, 236, 239, 240–1, 243n15 On Liberty (J.S. Mill), 8, 125, 131, 135, 136, 139, 243n15 On Literature (de Staël), 238, 243n15 Önnerfors, Andreas, 217, 225 “On the Residents of the Stars” (Kant), 193 Opticks (Newton), 70 Opus postumum (Kant), 79 Ortelius, Abraham, 21 Ovid, 173 Pange, Pauline de Broglie, comtesse de, 236 Paracelsus, 74 Parson Yorick (in Tristram Shandy), 107–8 Pascal, Blaise, 113

Paul: First Letter to the Corinthians, 174 Pentateuch, 48 “Perfection of Our Mysterious Art, The” (C. Weber), 199 Peters, Renata, 223–4 Peuschel, Christian Adam, 154, 155, 161, 175n6, 175n8, 175n13; Abhandlung von der Physiognomie, Metoposcopie und Chiromantie, 154 Pfaff, Christoph Heinrich, 89n90 Philosophical Essay on Man …, A (Marat), 7, 110, 112–14, 116–20 Physiognomika (Aristotle), 161 Physiognomische Fragmente (J.C. Lavater), 10, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168–9, 170, 174, 174n1, 175n13, 177n28 Physiognomy (Moreau de la Sarthe), 178n46 “Physionomie” (de Jaucourt), 153 Pitt, William (the younger), 172 Plato, Platonic, Neo-Platonic, 60, 71, 74, 76, 145n18, 159, 168 Pliny, 173 Plotinus, 74 “Polythéisme” (Mingard), 221 Pope, Alexander, 120, 159 Porta, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) della, 161, 168, 214 Porzio, Luca Antonio, 212 Pratica più agevole e più utile di esercizi militari … (A more useful and manageable practice of military exercises …) (Di Sangro), 216 Prémontval, Pierre Le Guay de, 62 Priestley, Joseph, 36; Chart of Biography, 36; New Chart of History, 36

Index Primaria Gran Loggia Nazionale (Naples), 212, 213, 214, 215–16, 218, 219, 229n21 Proof That a True Religion Necessarily Requires … (A. Weber), 189–92 Provençal, Jean-Michel, 133 Ptolemy, 21 Pythagoras, 74 Rabenius, Olaus, 55 Racine, Jean, 113 Rake’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 7, 97, 101 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 20 Reddy, William, 235 Reformation, 24, 37, 38, 39, 47, 194, 239 Reil, Johann, 144n4 Reill, Peter Hanns, 3, 4, 6, 13n, 20, 46, 70–91, 95, 114, 127, 144n4, 180, 208, 209, 210, 226, 242; “Between Mechanism and Hermeticism,” 71–2; The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 4; Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, 3, 6, 70–91, 95 Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (Lettow), 82 Reusch, Johann Peter, 197; Systema Metaphysicum, 197 Reynolds, Joshua, 108 Richards, Robert, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 87n49; The Romantic Conception of Life, 75–6 Richardson, Samuel, 96 Richter, John Paul Friedrich, 236 Robespierre, Maximilien, 239 Robinet, Jean-Baptiste, 168

261

Romantic Conception of Life, The (Richards), 75–6 Rosa, Philipp Samuel, 200 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 57, 59, 61, 111, 233, 238; Second Discourse, 111 Roussel, Pierre, 237–8; Système physique et moral de la femme, 237–8 Royal Society (London), 95, 213 Royal Society of Sciences (Göttingen), 32, 53, 54, 123 Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, 233, 234, 236 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de, 142 Salerno, Domenico Giuseppe, 224 San Gennaro, 211, 219–21, 222, 224 Sanmartino, Giuseppe, 215, 227 San Severo, Prince of. See Di Sangro, Raimondo Sauter, Christina, 128, 130 Saxony, Marshall of, 216 Scaliger, Josephus Justus, 22 Schellenberg, Johann Rudolf von, 156 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 74, 75–6, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81–2, 87n49, 87n57, 88n78, 89n90 Schiller, Friedrich, 144n4, 235 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 12, 235 Schlegel, Wilhelm, 236 Schlözer, August Ludwig von, 19 Schofield, Robert, 70–1, 83–4; Mechanism and Materialism, 70–1 Schröckh, Johann Matthias, 19 Second Discourse (Rousseau), 111 Seigel, Jerrold, 130, 132, 140, 145n17 Semler, Johann Salomo, 9, 190, 199–200, 207n100 Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, A (Sterne), 108

262

Index

Septuagint, 48 Settecento Riformatore (Venturi), 212 Shandy, Mrs., 105 Shandy, Tristram, 105–6 Shandy, Walter, 105, 107, 108 Sheehan, Jonathan, 6, 46 Simon, Richard, 64 Sisyphus, 105 Sloan, Phillip: “Kant on the History of Nature: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Critical Philosophy for Natural History,” 79 Solomon, 181, 182, 188 Sömmering, Samuel Thomas von, 144n4, 171, 172 Sophia (in Tom Jones), 97 Sorkin, David, 137, 139 Southwark Fair (Hogarth), 100 Spinoza, Baruch; Spinozism, Spinozistic, 75, 76, 77, 87n57; Deus sive Natura, 76 Spruit, Leen, 210, 217, 227n8 Staël, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame de, 12–13, 233–45; Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, 238–9, 243n15; Corinne, 235; Delphine, 235; On Germany, 12, 233, 236, 239, 240–1, 243n15; On Literature, 238, 243n15 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 115 Stauffenbühl, Johann Friedrich, 199 Steffens, Henrich, 82 Sterne, Laurence, 6, 7, 95, 96, 104–8; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 108; Clarissa Harlowe, 97; Moll Flanders, 97; Tom Jones, 97; Tristram Shandy, 7, 97, 104–8 Stevenson, David, 181, 182

Super-Enlightenment – Daring to Know Too Much, The (Edelstein), 9 Supplica (Di Sangro), 225 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 163, 167, 234 Sweet, Paul, 127 Swift, Jonathan, 105, 159 “Synchronized Overview of All of History” (“Synchronistische Uebersicht der ganzen Historie”) (Gatterer), 37, 40 Synopsis historiae universalis sex tabulis comprehensa (Gatterer), 26, 35 Systema Metaphysicum (Reusch), 197 Système physique et moral de la femme (Roussel), 237–8 System of Chemistry, A (Thomson), 133 System of Logic, A (J.S. Mill), 134 Tableau des révolutions du système politique … (Ancillon), 241 Tassin, René Prosper, 28–30; Nouveau traité de diplomatique …, vol. 2, 30 Taylor, Harriet (wife of J.S. Mill), 136 That a Denier of God … Is Yet Bound to Live in Fear of God (A. Weber), 189, 192–3 Theatricum Historicum (Helwig), 24 Thomas, Antoine Léonard, 237 Thomasius, Christian, 162 Thomson, Thomas: A System of Chemistry, 133 Tom Jones (Sterne), 97 Tournes, François Gautier de, 233 Toustain, Charles François, 28–30; Nouveau traité de diplomatique …, vol. 2, 30 Traité de l’existance [sic] … (Le Cat), 115 Traité des sensations et des passions … (Le Cat), 115

Index Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 97; See also Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The Über den natürlichen Unterschied der Gesichtszüge … (Camper), 171–2 “Über die Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen” (Lichtenberg), 165 Uhrsachen [sic] des Verfalls der Religion … (Causes of the Decline of Religion …) (Justi), 196 Uncle Toby (in Tristram Shandy), 107 Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology (Huneman), 77 Universal-Lexicon (Zedler), 154 Universal Natural History (Kant), 80 Van Dyck, Anthony, 98 Vanini, Lucilio, 213 Venturi, Franco, 212; Settecento Riformatore, 212 Viatte, Auguste: The Occult Sources of Romanticism, 235 Vico, Giambattista, 21, 61 Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Reill), 3, 6, 70–91, 95 Viviani, Vincenzo: Discorso … sulla vita e ritrovati del sig. Galileo Galilei, 219 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 4, 20, 113, 120 Von dem Alter der Hebräischen Vocalen … (On the age of the Hebrew vowels …) (J.D. Michaelis), 52 Von der Physiognomik (J.C. Lavater), 153, 155, 159, 166, 176n15 Voyage d’un François en Italie (Lalande), 218, 221–2 Voyages (Montesquieu), 221

263

Warburton, William, 61 Weber, Andreas, 10–11, 16, 179–207; Das Erhabene, worzu die Freymäurerey ihre ächten Schüler führet … (The Sublime, to Which Freemasonry Leads Its True Students …), 186; Proof That a True Religion Necessarily Requires …, 189–92; That a Denier of God … Is Yet Bound to Live in Fear of God, 189, 192–3; The Conformity of Nature and Grace, 11, 179, 193–4, 196–8, 199 Weber, Christian (brother of A.), 198–200; Der unüberwindliche Freymaurer (The Invincible Freemason), 199; “The Perfection of Our Mysterious Art,” 199 Webster, Noah, 62 Werner, Zacharias, 233 Whytt, Robert, 114, 115 Widow Wadman (in Tristram Shandy), 108 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 172 Winegarten, Renée, 234 Winock, Michel, 234 Winslow, Jacques-Bénigne, 224, 225 Wolff, Christian; Wolffian, Wolffianism, 10–11, 21, 45, 56, 71–2, 161, 179, 180, 184, 185, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 207n93; Collected Works, 198 Wordsworth, William, 132, 134 Zedler, Johann Heinrich: UniversalLexicon, 154 Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 162 Zwingli, Huldrych, 159

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THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES General Editor: Barbara Fuchs 1. Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, edited by Joseph Bristow 2. Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, edited by Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak 3. Culture and Authority in the Baroque, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman 4. Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures, edited by Lorna Clymer 5. Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, edited by Peter N. Miller 6. Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good, edited by Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonetti 7. Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein, edited by Robert S. Westman and David Biale 8. Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Clorinda Donato, and Peter Hanns Reill 9. The Age of Projects, edited by Maximillian E. Novak 10. Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience between Exclusion and Inclusion, edited by David N. Myers, Massimo Ciavolella, Peter H. Reill, and Geoffrey Symcox 11. Defoe’s Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maximillian E. Novak, edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher 12. Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf 13. Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800, edited by Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox 14. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, edited by Susan McClary 15. Godwinian Moments, edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers 16. Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, edited by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall 17. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher 18. Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures, edited by David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska 19. Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, edited by Joseph Bristow

20. Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities, edited by Marc André Bernier, Clorinda Donato, and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink 21. Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini 22. Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd 23. Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, edited by Michael Meranze and Saree Makdisi 24. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs