University of Virginia Library

VI

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.

2. From the Chain of Being to the Tree of Life.
As should be clear from the foregoing, the frequent
references to the concatenation of creatures in
eighteenth-century science (with, perhaps, an excep-
tion for Robinet) appeal rather to the principle of
continuity than to that of plenitude. Now although
continuity is an idea implicit in that of plenitude, the
converse is not true. That nature makes no jumps—and
no scientist in the second half of the eighteenth century
appeared to doubt it—does not in fact mean that
nature realizes all those possibilities implicit from all
eternity in the act of creation. The world's continuity,
in other words, is due to the action of laws and forces
and not to a necessity inherent in the divine nature.
And with that the very foundation of the principle of
plenitude, namely, its connection with the principle of
sufficient reason stressed by Leibniz, is broken down.

Typical in this sense is, once again, Buffon's position,
when he places the principle of sufficient reason
among moral entities (êtres moraux), created by man
on the basis of arbitrary relations which can produce
“rien... de physique et de réel,” and can never be-
come a “physical reason” for things. It is therefore
illegitimate to ask ourselves the “why” of nature (His-
toire des animaux, Ch. V). Science no sooner rejects
the principle of sufficient reason than it does the prin-
ciple of plenitude, that is, the very foundation of the
Chain of Being. The principle of continuity which, as
we have seen, survives the process of temporalization,
is by itself not enough to guarantee the survival of the
Chain of Being. And the best epitaph, at the conclusion
of this sketch, might be one from the same Buffon:
le vivant et l'animé, au lieu d'être un degré méta-
physique des êtres, est une propriété physique de la
matière (“Animated life, instead of being a metaphysi-
cal grade of being, is only a physical property of mat-
ter,” ibid., Ch. I).

The succession of living forms appears explainable
now on the basis of the working of physical laws or
of an activity inherent in nature: nature, as La Mettrie
says, is “neither Chance, nor God” (ni Hasard, ni Dieu).
The certainty of this descending process, from God to
the natural world, fails; and with that is lost too the
presumption that science can reconstruct the plan of
creation in all its fullness by working its way back per
vestigias.

Now we may say that the divorce between the two
ideas, that of continuity and that of plenitude, is com-
plete, even though they appear associated once more
in romantic philosophy: in Schiller's dialectic of
Formtrieb and Stofftrieb; in Fichte's conception of the
Ego as infinite activity; in the philosophy of nature
of Schelling; in the ethico-political ideal of the reach-
ing of moral perfection through an indefinite progress;
and in the conception of aesthetic progress as infinite
productivity.

In science, the metaphor of the Chain of Being was
to continue to circulate long after its “crisis”; the
English paleontologist James Parkinson, still in the
second decade of the nineteenth century, saw in it an
obstacle to the correct interpretation of the data of

the new science (Greene [1959], p. 122). But in general,
in nineteenth-century science, another metaphor gains
currency, one that keeps the quality of continuity but
not of plentitude. It is the tree of evolution, published
by Lamarck in the Philosophie zoologique ([1809]; re-
produced in Greene, p. 163), which represents a series
branching off in an irregularly spaced but uninter-
rupted way. It is what Darwin calls the “Tree of Life”
(Origin of Species [1859], Ch. IV).