II
The first body of thought in all its variant forms can
be traced in such representative texts as Plato's
Timaeus, the Stoic presentation in Cicero's De natura
deorum, the first chapter of Genesis, the hexaemeral
literature, especially the Hexaemeron of Basil the
Great, in many passages of Saint Augustine, Saint
Thomas Aquinas, the Cambridge Platonists, John Ray,
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, William Paley, and the
nineteenth-century controversial literature over evolu-
tion. Such philosophies make man a part of and yet
distinct from nature, his life cycle attesting to the
former, his uniqueness because of the manner of his
creation to the latter. It is further assumed that man
and nature do not work at cross purposes, an assump-
tion which has rapidly broken down during the last
one hundred years (Marsh's
Man and Nature, 1864, is
an excellent landmark) with accumulating knowledge
of man's destructiveness of the natural environment.
The unity, order, and harmony of nature are assumed
because the creator is wise, reasonable, and no lover
of chaos. The idea of adaptability is the keystone of
this arch because it explicates and throws light on final
causes: adaptability of environment to man, as evi-
denced by the multifarious uses to which it is put, and
of man to environment as is clearly evidenced by
environmental limitations on human settlement or on
procuring food, clothing, shelter. Furthermore, the
extraordinarily wide distribution of the human race
compared with that of individual species of plants or
animals like the cactus or the polar bear, show the
intricacy of this adaptability, reflecting the God-given
superior endowments of man. Before the attacks made
upon the idea of design in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and its replacement by nine-
teenth-century evolutionary theory (with a stern
Malthusian message from the social world), it was an
exalted, almost universally accepted, all-embracing
generalization, accounting for the distribution of all
forms of life, their relation to one another, and for
differences among peoples. It was truly holistic, and
it is noteworthy that with the general collapse of
teleological explanation at least in physical science, the
history of the last century has been one of attempts
to create with some variant of ecological theory a
holistic conception which, like the old, could embrace
the whole of nature from the attitudes of man to a
glaciated Swiss valley.
Although essentially earthbound, the generalization
could be reconciled with eschatology (the earth still
is the abode of man even though a temporary one)
on the one hand, and concepts of an order and harmony
in nature on the other. Nature is fundamentally kind;
J. G. von Herder in the eighteenth century and Carl
Ritter in the nineteenth likened it to a nursery or a
school for man. This conception offered opportunities
for ideas stressing the intimate organic relationships
between man and his surroundings which, even with
the collapse of religious teleology, could still thrive
in Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropogeographie which reflects
the new thought engendered by the Darwinian theory.
It could stress earth-boundedness; it could also find a
place for human inventiveness and skill. In seventeenth-
century design arguments of men like Leibniz and John
Ray, theoretical knowledge gained from the new sci-
ence leads to practical knowledge and control of the
natural environment. Deep probing into the secrets of
nature increases one's respect for and love of the
Creator and enables man, made in His image, to com-
plete the creation in myriad ways—by agriculture,
drainage, town and city building. It possessed a reli-
gious inspiration from the texts of the Psalms and of
Romans 1:20; it found in nature a home for man; it
had a place for technology, and for homilies on the
compatibility of religion and science.
This teleological view of nature and man's place in
it was dominant until the era of critical questioning
and analysis of final causes, conspicuously by Spinoza
in his Ethics (Part I, Appendix), by Hume in his Dia-
logues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), and by Kant
in his Critique of Judgment (1790). It foundered badly
even before the losing battles of the controversy over
evolution, both in the writings of Buffon in which unity
and harmony of the natural world, but not the tele-
ological explanation, are accepted, and in the writings
of Alexander von Humboldt, a good example being his
introduction to the Kosmos (1845-62). The Darwinian
theory of evolution offered another alternative in
which adaptation and interrelationships in nature were
not neglected. Phrases like “struggle for existence” and
“natural selection” obscure the fact that the idea of
the web of life (expressed in less pugnacious and
bloodthirsty language) replaced old notions of interre-
lationships by design, and provided a basis in evolu-
tionary theory for modern ideas of ecology, the biotic
community, the biocenose, and its fashionable and
contemporary theoretical expression, the ecosystem. If
we wish to take the long view, both the design argu-
ment and ecological theory were attempts to formulate
the conception of an order of nature as well as the
nature of human participation in it.
If this analysis is correct, there has been a historical
continuity from the idea of design—nature created by
God with love, reason, and foresight—to a concept of
harmony and balance in nature, for example, in the
writings of Buffon and von Humboldt, in which tele-
ology is eliminated or perhaps persists only in meta-
phorical language. Then the concept of balance and
harmony based on the idea of a web of life, itself the
result of evolutionary forces, ironically prepared the
way for the view widely held today of the fragility
of nature—nature as an ecosystem—in relation to
human power, in short, a nature at the mercy of man.
The reasons for preserving it are not based on religion
or anything transcendental but arise from values
created by society. What started with God has ended
with man. Basically this newer conception is a conse-
quence of the power of the human race to produce
cumulative modifications of the physical environ-
ment—from primordial practices like clearing and
starting fires to bombs and defoliants—and of the in-
terpretations which have been made of this power. We
shall return to this question in discussing the third idea,
the force of human agency.
