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2. Crisis of the Chain of Being: Permanence and
Becoming in Nature. In a world hierarchically ar-
ranged, such as the one described by the great meta-
phor of a Chain or scale of beings, orders of creatures
had to be considered fixed ab aeterno with their essen-
tial and thus unalterable characteristics. In the third
decade of the century Réaumur wrote: “The author
of nature wanted our earth to be populated with a
prodigious number of species of animals, and has given
the earth those species fit for it to possess....” And
again: “One must start from the principle that the
species of insects are—no less than those of animals—
invariable in form” (Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire
des insectes [1734-42], II, XL-XLI). The physician
Antonio Vallisnieri (1661-1730) affirmed on anatomical
grounds that it was impossible for carnivorous habits
to be acquired: it is no accident (only to regret it
afterward) that God, immutable and omnipotent,
wanted herbivores to be so different from carnivores:
such difference is but another proof of the unalterable
structure of that great theater that is nature (Opere
fisico-mediche, I, 315A). In general all adaptation phe-
nomena should be interpreted not as chance environ-
mental mutations but as providentially preordained
laws (ibid., I, 137B). The fixity of species is also basic
to Linnaeus' Philosophia botanica (1751).

Faith in the permanence of nature (required by the
idea of the Chain of Being) and the affirmation that
there is evolution in nature are clearly contradictory:
mediating between them was a theory of the preexis-
tence of seeds—already diffuse, beginning from the last
decades of the seventeenth century—according to
which every living thing would exist already formed
in all its parts in the seed, and all seeds, created ab
initio, would simply be transmitted and developed in
reproduction. With such a doctrine—adopted by Fon-
tenelle and Leibniz among others—one could conceive
of the history of nature as explication and development
of all those possibilities already foreseen ab aeterno as
essential parts of the world's structure.

This transformist view afforded a reconciliation of
the idea of plenitude with that of the perfectibility
of nature. And in this sense it is used, for example,
by Robinet in his De la nature (1761-68). In a word,
natural development, if seen as development of matu-
ration of preexisting seeds, adds nothing really new to
creation but simply explicates its original productivity.
Nature is continuously working itself out, and the
principle of plenitude is manifest in this temporal
process.

Yet just this transformism was bound to challenge,
explicitly or implicitly, the notion of the fixity of spe-
cies and thus precipitate a crisis in the hierarchical
image of the cosmos. But for that matter numerous
and grave objections to the fixity of species were being
raised by the necessity to give some plausible account
of hereditary and adaptation phenomena, which re-
quire the intervention of variation and of environ-
mental determination. Remarkable how Maupertuis in
his Essai de cosmologie (1750), precisely by reflecting
upon adaptation phenomena and the natural selection
that implies, was led to draw the same conclusion that
Kant was to draw some years later, in regard to the
illegitimacy of the empirical use of the principles of
plenitude, of homogeneity, and of continuity. Only
those species that have certain adaptable relations
(rapports de convenance) with nature may survive.

(Essai, in
Oeuvres [1756], I, 11-12).

The continuity of the natural world can never be, then,
an empirical statement: uniformity is (as we may say)
a spiritual exigency and has no exact counterpart in
experience: Continuity pleases our mind, but does it
please Nature? (Elle plaît à notre esprit, mais plaît-elle
à la Nature?—ibid., 51). The Chain of Being, thanks
to which we may imagine a universe so constituted
that the beings that fill it can only be the perfectly
juxtaposed parts of the whole, was perhaps broken up
by some telluric cataclysm; however that may be, it
cannot now be reconstructed on the basis of observa-
tion. And it is for this reason that Maupertuis, in the
third part of his Essai, presents it as pure conjecture.

But even more telling than Maupertuis' Essai of the
new philosophy of nature is his Système de la nature
(first ed., in Latin, 1751), wherein we witness the disso-
lution of that bond between natural forms and divine
creativity which had, from the Timaeus on, formed the
basis of the Chain of Being. To suppose that all indi-

viduals were made by the divine will on one and the
same day of creation, says Maupertuis, means to have
recourse to a miraculous rather than physical explana-
tion. The laws at work in nature, which are the only
object of science, operate to conserve and also to
transform natural forms (French edition [1756], sec-
tions XI-XLIX).

The importance of this new conception of the rela-
tions between God and nature is certainly the decisive
element in the dissolution of the Chain of Being. As
Roger has observed ([1963], pp. 486-87), Maupertuis,
rejecting the preexistence of seeds, the notion of God
as “maker,” and the fixity of forms, was led to study
the life of natural forms in time, introducing duration
into biological sciences as an essential element. This
general temporalization of nature is a particular exam-
ple of what Lovejoy has called ([1936], p. 242) the
“temporalizing” of the Chain of Being. According to
the traditional conception, the Scale of Creatures was
static and the temporal process brought no enrichment.
In the new “temporalized” version the plenum for-
marum was conceived instead “not as the inventory
but as the program of nature, which is being carried
out gradually and exceedingly slowly in cosmic history”
(ibid., p. 244).