1. The Principle of Continuity in the Philosophy
of
Becoming.
We have seen from the beginning how
the idea of the Chain of Being
was founded on two
basic principles: the principle of plenitude and
that
of continuity. In the history of the idea, as we have
been
reconstructing it, these two principles not only
go together but at times
indeed coincide. But we should
not forget that they have completely
different and
independent origins. The principle of
plenitude—of
Platonic origin—was born of an essential
attribute of
the Demiurge or Creator God, and that is His super-
abundance and necessary creativity;
it is therefore
bound up with the principle of sufficient reason, as
Leibniz tells us quite explicitly. The principle of conti-
nuity, on the other hand, is a biological one,
arising
from the observation that there exist beings hardly
reducible
to one or another of the great classes into
which all natural things seem
to fall. Now the different
origin of these two principles should be borne
in mind
in retracing the dissolution of the Chain of Being.
The question of the existence or nonexistence of
species in nature ended up
in a crisis for the principle
of plenitude: if one acknowledged the real,
objective
existence of those genetic entities called species, it was
hard to picture nature except as a series of distinct
units—which of course contradicted the principle of
plenitude.
It was not however impossible to imagine
a continuity in the
series—a continuity subsisting
somehow between the inorganic and the organic, be-
tween the vegetable and animal worlds: witness, for
example, the position of Buffon. We have seen that
he had come in the
course of his research to reverse
his first denial of the existence of
species, indeed to
the point of affirming that they are the only
natural
reality; and yet he never denied the unity and continu-
ity of nature. And this in the name of
the experimental
method, which should always remind us of the abstract
character of definitions, and distinguished the name
from the thing. Once a
definition is accepted, writes
Buffon in Chapter VIII of his Histoire des animaux
(1749), it is imagined that
the word is a line of demar-
cation among
the products of nature; that, for example,
all above a certain line
“should be really animal, and
that
everything below be nothing but vegetable....
But as
we have already said many times, these lines
of demarcation do not exist in
nature.” The same con-
tinuity—unity between inorganic and organic, between
animal and man, unity in the perpetual flux of
things—is amply
witnessed in the writings of Diderot
in the Rêve de d'Alembert: “All creatures merge
into
one another... all in perpetual flux.... Every animal
is more or
less a man; every mineral is more or less
a plant; every plant is more or
less an animal. There is
nothing precise in nature.” (Tous les êtres circulent les
uns dans les autres...
tout est dans un flux perpétuel.
... Tout animal est plus ou
moins homme; tout minéral
est plus ou moins plante; toute
plante est plus ou moins
animal. Il n'y a rien de précis dans
la nature.) Even
Robinet, in the name of the principle of
continuity,
denies that the organic and the inorganic are quite
different, to the point of attributing a kind of rudimen-
tary reason to matter even in its inorganic phase.
Ac-
cording to La Mettrie nature seems to
proceed, so to
speak, by trial and error towards greater and greater
organization, and it is just this that assures its unity:
there is a kind
of “imperceptibly graduated scale” in
the sensory
faculties, from plant to animal to man; and
nature “passes
through all gradations without skipping
a single one in all its various
productions” (
L'homme-
plante
[1748], in Oeuvres [1796], II, 69). J. T.
Needham
too, rejecting the fixity of natural forms, considers the
gradation in nature as the result of a progressive orga-
nization (cf. the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal
Society,
45 [1748], no. 490). Robinet and Bonnet debate
at
length the problem of reconciling the idea of a Chain
of Being with that of
the evolution of forms. In general,
then, a latent vitalism, introducing
the idea of a teleol-
ogy inherent in matter,
tends more to fill than to
accentuate the breaks among the different orders
of
natural reality.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, then,
the temporalization of
the natural sciences disparages
but does not eliminate the idea of a
biological con-
tinuum which, as we have seen, persists as a recurrent
topos in the scientific thought of the time. It
persists
however, in a very different formulation from the
traditional
one: not as gradation and contiguity of
natural forms, but as (temporal)
continuity in the orga-
nizational
process of nature. And as such it goes well
beyond the eighteenth century,
surviving in the bio-
logical vitalism of the
following century, up to Berg-
son's
élan vital. In general we might say that
in all
philosophies of becoming—vitalism, post-Kantian ide-
alism, evolutionism—continuity is
adopted as (to use
Kant's term once more) a “regulative
ideal,” capable
only of assuring the unity of becoming. Even the
doc-
trine of evolution can be understood
as a temporal
translation of the continuity principle. It is no
accident
that one of the most recent theorists of evolution avails
himself of it, not only as criterion for the interpretation
of nature but
as the foundation of a “new humanism.”
Writes Julian
Huxley: “... all aspects of reality are
subject to evolution,
from atoms and stars to fish and
flowers, from fish and flowers to human
society and
values—indeed... all reality is a single process
of
evolution.... ” The biological process “takes
place in
a series of steps or grades, each grade occupied by a
successive group of animals and plants, each group
sprung from a
preexisting one and characterized by
a new and improved pattern of
organization.” This
assures the kinship of man with nature:
“he now knows
that he is not an isolated phenomenon, cut off
from
the rest of nature by his uniqueness. Not only is he
made of the
same matter and operated by the same
energy as all the rest of the cosmos,
but... he is linked
by genetic continuity with all the other living inhabit-
ants of his planet”
(“The Evolutionary Vision,” in
Evolution after Darwin, 3 vols., Chicago [1960],
III,
249-53).
But this survival of the principle of continuity is by
itself not enough to
guarantee the survival of the Chain
of Being, even in its temporalized
form. Of inde-
pendent origin, the idea of
continuity contributes to
the development of the idea of the Chain of
Being
only insofar as continuity is associated with, or indeed
fused
with, the principle of plenitude. And, surviving
the principle of plenitude
(though in a profoundly
changed way), the idea of continuity also survives
the
idea of a Chain of Being, which was grounded essen-
tially in the principle of plenitude.
