1.7 The objective study of nature

Knowledge before the Modern period was organised around the practical problems human beings faced.

During the medieval period in the West, interest in knowing about the natural world was fired by the thought of what it could do for human beings. For example, when plants were not being interpreted as human-directed messages from the Creator, they knowledge of them was sought for purposes of medicine or food: and the way in which they were classified reflected this.

The practical orientation is shown in a number of examples given by Keith Thomas in Man & the Natural World (London 1983 Allen Lane). The following examples are drawn from Thomas.

In a book by William Coles published in 1656 the categories of plants are defined thus:

(From Thomas, p.52.)

John Parkinson in 1640 used categories such as:

- categories that looked at plants solely from the point of view of their use or lack of use to human beings.
(From Thomas, p.52)

In 1526 the Grete Herbal divided mushrooms simply into two types:

Tudor herbals highlighted medicinal value, subdividing according to particular healing power. They were of course published to help people identify plants for medicinal purposes.

Thomas argues that at the end of the medieval period it was conventional to regard the world "as made for man and all other species as subordinate to his wishes." It was this anthropocentric assumption that was eroded in the Modern period - in the first place, says Thomas, by natural history. (Thomas, p.51.)

The situation with regard to animals is similar.

A beautiful and scholarly presentation of the Aberdeen Bestiary is available. Following this link might open a new window. Close it (click top left hand box) to come back here.

Medieval zoologists had inherited from Aristotle some concern to classify on the basis of anatomy, habitat, and means of reproduction, but they overlay that with their anthropocentric perspective and introduce into their ordering the value of animals to humans as food, in medicine and as the carriers of messages from the Creator about how they should behave. Thomas argues that Buffon in the 18th Century was still maintaining that animals should be ordered according to their relationship to human beings: but just what this meant is less than obvious. (Thomas, p. 53.)

The anthropocentrism is anyway clearer with earlier writers such as Konrad Gesner (1516-1565) and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605)

Topsell, an English divine writing in his Historie of Foure Footed Beasts (1607), explained that his main point was to show which beasts were the friends of human beings, which could be trusted - and which eaten. (Thomas, p. 53.)

John Caius in his Of English Dogges published here in 1576 establishes these categories:

The pre-modern interest in human anatomy was a concern again to do with damage and illness; and so was the interest in physiology. This is why these two areas were flourishing during times when noone thought to see them as parts of wider disciplines, physiology as distinct from human physiology, morphology as distinct from human anatomy.

The Arabic tradition was probably more explicitly limited by its concern with healing than that of the West.

Francis Bacon is usually read as urging as a novel thing the 'usefulness' of new learning. But this is perhaps a point that would have been accepted as a truism rather than a revolutionary idea. No one would have doubted, at any rate, the usefulness of the old knowledge anatomy and physiology, knowledge of herbs, etc.. The usefulness of the knowledge was its whole point.

What happened with the Modern revolution was a challenge to this point: maybe things had a structure, a working, that was interesting for its own sake. The more distant aim might have been utility. But the more proximate one was to gain an understanding of animals and plants (and rocks etc.) based on the premise that there were things to understand there that were quite independent of human needs and practical concerns. Thomas identifies this as the fundamental shift of Modernism: the emergence of the idea that nature had a structure independent of human beings, and one that should be studied.

What do you think? How admirable is the quest for knowledge 'for its own sake'? What percentage of the GNP should be devoted to it? How do you tell when this is indeed what fires the quest? Discussion site

VP

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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
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