Leibniz on the unicorn and various other curiosities

Early Science and Medicine

Volumn 3, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 267-288

  Ariew, Roger ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANIMAL; ANIMAL DISEASE; ARTICLE; CONGENITAL MALFORMATION; GERMANY; HISTORY; INFORMATION CENTER; TERATOLOGY;

ABNORMALITIES; ANIMAL DISEASES; ANIMAL POPULATION GROUPS; ANIMALS; GERMANY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; MUSEUMS; NATURAL HISTORY; TERATOLOGY;

EID: 0032209655     PISSN: 13837427     EISSN: 15733823     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157338298X00068     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. See, for example, T. Leinkauf, Mundus Combinates Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SJ (1602-1680) (Berlin, 1993),
2. P. Findlen, Possessing Nature (Berkeley, 1994),
3. W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994),
4. P. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1995),
5. and A. Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, 1997).
6. Fontenelle, "Eloge," in G. W. Leibniz, Opera Omnia, ed. L. Dutens (Geneva, 1768), 1: xx.
7. See B. Russell, A critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London, 1900)
8. and L. Gouturat, La Logique de Leibniz (Paris, 1901; reprint ed. Hildesheim, 1969).
9. See G. H. R. Parkinson, Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1965).
10. See D. Garber, "Leibniz: Physics and Philosophy," in Cambridge Companion to Labniz, ed. N. Jolley (Cambridge, 1994), 270-352.
11. See R. C. Sleigh, Leibniz and Arnauld, A Commentary on Their Correspondence (New Haven, 1990).
12. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875-90), 2: 328.
13. D. Rutherford, "Metaphysics: The late period," in Cambridge, Companion to Leibniz, ed. N. Jolley (Cambridge, 1994), 158.
14. Rutherford, "Metaphysics: The late period," 163.
15. Rutherford, "Metaphysics: The late period," 156-57.
16. G. W. Leibniz, Samtlische Schriften und Briefe (Darmstad and Leipzig, 1923), 6.3: 573.
17. Also cited in a discussion of Leibniz's sincerity by R. M. Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford, 1994), 52.
18. Mercer, in C. Mercer and R. C. Sleigh, Jr., "Metaphysics: The early period to the Discourse," in Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. N. Jolley (Cambridge, 1994), 71.
19. There a fair amount of evidence for the proposition that Leibniz might have tailored his various pronouncements to fit his audience. There are even a couple of stories that Leibniz repeated which indicate that he would not have been embarrassed to have been seen as doing so. See the early episode about his writing a letter of entrance to an alchemical society and the later episode about his pretending to be a devout Catholic in R. Ariew, "Leibniz: Life and Works," in Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. N. Jolley (Cambridge, 1994), 21, 31.
20. See Leibniz, "Meditation on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas," Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis, 1989), 23-34
21. or "Discourse on Metaphysics," sec. 24, Philosophical Essays, 56-57.
22. Scientia or science is also applicable to God, as divine knowledge (la science divine), with a distinction to be drawn between God's knowledge of possibles, that is, his simple understanding (scientia simplicis intelligentiae), and his knowledge of actuals, that is, his knowledge by intuition (scientia visionis or la science de la vision)-see Leibniz, "Letter to Arnauld, May 1686," Philosophical Essays, 74,
23. and "The Source of Contingent Truth," Philosophical Essays, 98-101.
24. For example, two of the volumes of S. Dupleix's multi-volume collegiate textbook, written around 1603-1610, concern the "sciences": La Physique, ou science des choses naturelles and La métaphysique, ou science surnaturelle. Here "science" encompasses much that we wouldn't consider as science; given that another of Dupleix's volumes is entitled La logique, ou art de discourir et raisonner, in this tradition, the main contrast for "science" is "art" or "practice"; see Dupleix, La logique (Paris, 1984), I, chap. 8-11.
25. "Philosophia Intellectualis: Theoretica, Logica, Metaphysica, Pneumatica; Practica, Ethica & Politica. Philosophia rerum imaginatibnis, seu mathematica: Mathesis pura, ubi Arithmetica, Algebra, Geometria, Musica; Astronomia cum Geographia generali, Optica, Gnomonica; Mechanica, bellica, nautica, Architectonica; Opificiaria, omnigena a vi imaginationis pendentia. Philosophia rerum sensibilium seu Physica: Physica massarum, & similarium, quo pertinet etiam Chymia, de aqua, igne, salibus, &c; Regni mineralis; vegetabilis, quorsum Agricultura; animalis, quorsum Anatomica quoque; Oeconomica, & opificiaria artificialis physicis nitentia." Idea Leibniziana Bibliothecae ordinandae contractior, Opera Omnia, 5: 213-14.
26. Ravier-in E. Ravier, Bibliographie des Oeuvres de Leibniz ([1937] reprint ed., Hildesheim, 1966)-lists 115 articles, together with 60 monographs, 68 chapters in edited works, and 56 reviews.
27. Acta Eruditorum (January 1693, erroneously dated 1692), 40-42.
28. "L'Honneur que nous fait S. A. S. M. le Duc d'Hanovre de donner à la lecture de nos Journaux quelqu'un de ces momens précieux qu'il emploie avec tant de succès au bonheur de ses Etats, et à la gloire des belles-lettres, est un effet de cette curiosité que lui donne une vaste étanduë d'esprit, qui au milieu des plus grandes affaires qui l'occupent, lui laisse encore plus du tems pour les belles choses. Mais la bonté avec laquelle ce Prince si intelligent et si éclairé daigne enrichir nôtre travail, par la part qu'il veut qu'on nous fasse des choses les plus rares qui se trouvent dans ses Etats, est une suite de l'estime qu'il fait de celui de tous les sçavans, qui peut-être pourroit un jour l'obliger à nous faire communiquer les choses merveilleuses de Physique et de Mécanique qu'il fait voir tous les jours avec admiration aux gens de sa Cour, qui ont l'honneur de l'approcher de plus près," "Extrait d'une lettre de M. L. à l'Auteur du Journal des Savans, écrite de Hanover le 18 Juin 1677, contenant la relation et la figure d'un chevreuil coiffée d'une manière fort extraordinaire," Opera Omnia, 2b: 175.
29. Mathematische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1849-55), 4: 194.
30. Mathematische Schriften, 4: 199.
31. "Exposé d'une lettre de Mr. Leibniz à l'Abbé de St. Pierre, sur un chien qui parle," Opera Omnia, 2b: 180;
32. Hist, de l'Academie Royale des Sciences de Paris, 1715.
33. Philosophische Schriften, S: 393-94.
34. Philosophische Schriften, 3: 403-04;
35. "Letter to Coste, on Human Freedom," Philosophical Essays, pp. 195-96.
36. Coste's undated reply relates that the prophets lost all credibility because of their rash prediction of the resurrection of one of their members. Philosophische Schriften, 3: 405.
37. G. W. Leibniz, Protogaea, ed. Ludwig Sheidt (Göttingen, 1749), 1.
38. Leibniz intended to continue his history by treating the oldest known people, then the different peoples that succeeded one another in that country, treating their languages, and the mixtures of these languages, to the extent that they can be judged by etymologies. The origins of Brunswick would begin with Charlemagne and continue with the Emperors descended from him and with the five Emperors of the House of Brunswick. This segment of time would encompass the ancient history of Saxony through the House of Witikind, of Upper Germany through the House of the Guelfs, and of Lombardy through the Houses of the Dukes and Marquis of Tuscany and Liguria, tracing the descent of the Princes of Brunswick. After these origins would come the genealogy of the House of the Guelfs, with a short history up to the seventeenth century. This genealogy would be accompanied by those of the other great Houses, including the House of the Ghibellines, ancient and modern Austria, and Bavaria. To accomplish his design and to amass sufficient materials, Leibniz scoured the whole of Germany, visited ancient Abbeys, searched town archives, and examined tombs and other antiquities. He never completed the History of the House of Brunswick, which was probably an important reason for why he was out of favor with his employer toward the end of his life. But we should not think that Leibniz balked at the project, preferring instead to write a volume of geology. In fact, Leibniz took on the project with his customary optimism, that is, he took on much more than he could reasonably accomplish. One cannot look upon the masses of corollary materials he did publish and think that he was not completely given to the project, including the first volume. Among other works, Leibniz brought out the Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus, a volume containing the acts of nations, declarations of war, peace treaties and marriage contracts of various sovereigns, in 1692; and in 1700, he published a supplement to the volume; from 1707-11, he published a three-volume collection of original pieces related to the history of Brunswick, Scriptorum Brunsvicensia illustrantium. (Leibniz also published Lettre sur la connextion des maisons de Brunsvic et d'Este, 1695;
39. Specimen Historiae Arcanea sive Anectodatae de Vita Alexandra VI, 1696;
40. Dissertatio de Origine Germaniorum, 1697;
41. Accesiones Historicae, vol. 1, 1698, vol. 2, 1700;
42. Alberici Monachi Trium Fontium Chronicon, 1698.)
43. Leibniz left behind enough materials that G. H. Pertz, a Hanover librarian and editor of Leibniz's works was able to put it all together and finally publish the history in four fat volumes during the nineteenth century. The only complete unpublished manuscript was the preface, the Protogaea; but it was not totally unknown. Leibniz disseminated bits and pieces of it in letters, various articles in learned journals, and inserted a few paragraphs of it in his Theodicy. He appeared most proud of his account of fossils, having written a letter about fossils, the aforementioned report to the Académie des Sciences de Paris about fossils, and various sections of Protogaea, particularly chapter 18, "Where do the imprints of various fish in clay come from?" which I discuss below. ("Epistola ad autorem dissertationes de figuris animalium quae in lapidibus observantur, & lithozoorum nomine venire possum," Opera Omnia, 2b: 176-77,
44. and Mémoire sur les pierres qui renferment des plantes & des poissons desséchés, Opera Omnia, 2b: 178-79).
45. According to J.-M. Barrande, Tellesio was a Portuguese Jesuit who wrote Historia general de Ethiopia Alta (1660),
46. translated and summarized by Thévenot. Protogaea: de l'aspect primitif de la terre, ed. J.-M. Barrande and trans. B. de Saint-Germain (Toulouse, 1993), 242
47. Chap. 35, Opera Omnia, 2b: 230:
48. De cornu Monocerosis et ingenii animali Quedlinburgi effosso. Von Guericke's book is Experimenta nova, ut vacant Magdeburgica, de pauco spatio ⋯ (Amsterdam, 1672).
49. See Protogaea: de l'aspect primitif de la terre, 242-43.
50. B. Accordi, "The Museum Calceolarium (XVIth century) of Verona Illustrated in 1622 by Ceriti and Chiocco." Geologica Romana 14 (1977), 42.
51. Protogée, ed. and trans. B. de Saint-Germain (Paris: L. Langlois, 1859), 80 note.
52. "C'est de reste à la suite de la découverte par Otto von Guericke à Quedlemburg, dans le Harz, en 1663, des fragments d'un skelette (les ossements d'un éléphant, mais avec une seule défense), que Leibniz fut convaincu de la réalité des licornes," A. Schnapper, Le géant, la licorne et la tulipe. Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), 1: 94.
53. Opera Omnia, 2b: 179.
54. The opposition to the poetical thesis of Kircher and Becher was a new development in Leibniz's thought. C. Cohen cites an undated and unedited Leibnizian manuscript (probably from before 1678, the year of Leibniz's first meeting with Steno); there Leibniz writes: "I find it difficult to believe that the bones one sometimes finds in the fields, or that one discovers by digging in the earth, are the remains of real giants; similarly, that the maltese stones commonly called serpent teeth are parts of fish, and that shells often found rather far from the sea are the certain marks of the sea having covered these places, and upon withdrawing, left behind these shells, which then became petrified. If that were true, perhaps the earth would have to be much older than is reported by the holy scriptures. But I don't want to stop there, and we need to give natural reasons here. Thus, 1 believe that these forms of bones of animals and shells are often only games of nature which have been formed apart without having come from animals. For it is invariable that stones grow and take on a thousand strange forms, as testify the stones that the reverend father Kircher has amassed in his Subterraneous World." C. Cohen, Le destin du mammouth (Paris, 1994), 79.
55. Protogaea, chap. 20. See also R. Ariew, "A New Science of Geology in the Seventeenth Century?" in Revolution and Continuity: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Early Modern Science, ed. P. Barker and R. Ariew (Washington DC, 1991), 81-92.
56. Cf. Leibniz, Letter to Remond, Philosophische Schriften, 3: 607.
57. A. Goudin, Philosophie suivant les principes de Saint Thomas, trans. T. Bourard (Paris, 1864 [original ed. Paris, 1668]), 301: Des corps mixtes inanimes, dit fossiles.
58. "New System of Nature," Philosophical Essays, 139;
59. see also "Against Barbaric Physics," and others.
60. For more on monsters as contraventions of the ordinary course of nature, see P. Dear, "Jesuit Mathematical Science and the Reconstitution of Experience in the Early Seventeenth Century," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 18 (1987), 133-175.
61. Following Dear, the basic point is this: the essential properties of an acorn explain why it grows into an oak tree, given that it actually does; if it does not, accidental impediments must have prevented it: an acorn failing to grow into a oak tree would shed no light on the nature of acorns. Deviations from the ordinary course of nature, if sufficiently spectacular, would be dubbed "monsters," and far from being regarded as providing privileged insight, they would be taken to be portents or omens, literally supernatural occurrences due to God's intervention; whether portents or not, they were by definition contrary to nature, and hence not illuminating of the natural order. See also L. Daston and K. Parks, "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in 16th and 17th century France and England," Past and Present 92 (1981), 20-34.
62. According to C. Cohen, it is impossible for Leibniz to conceive of extinct species; for him, the world was created perfect (Le destin du mammouth, 83-84).
63. Cohen repeats the thesis on 248: "But since God has created the world perfect and immutable, the disappearance of species remains unthinkable for him." To support the thesis, she quotes again from Leibniz's unedited manuscript: "we find stone shells of several unknown species which we would seek in vain in the sea, a mark that these are games of nature, unless one holds that they are lost species, something not likely" (Le destin du mammouth, 315-16).
64. But this is mistaken. First, Cohen's thesis is too strong. Leibniz is giving probabilistic arguments. There is no question about what is conceivable or what is possible. Second, Leibniz has changed his mind about every other aspect of the matter under discussion: accepting the bones as petrified remains of aquatic origin and rejecting the thesis that they are games of nature. There is no reason to believe that Leibniz would continue to hold it is not likely that they are lost species. Third, and most important, when giving a metaphysical account, Leibniz does not deny the physical phenomenon. Nothing follows about the physical extinction of species, even if Leibniz believed that there are no extinctions in a strict metaphysical sense. The same holds for the physical phenomena of birth and death, given Leibniz's metaphysical account of birth and death (see Philosophical Essays, 141).
65. Gerje, Otnoschenje Leibnitia k Rossii i Petru Velikomu (1871), 76,
66. as quoted in O. Neverov, "His Majesty's Cabinet and Peter I's Kunstkammer," The Origins of Museums, The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th and 17th Century Europe, ed. O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford, 1985), 56.
67. The full text is available in Nouvelles lettres et opuscules inedits, ed. A. Foucher de Careil (Paris, 1857), 7: 473-74.
68. Nouvelles lettres et opuscules inedits, 7: 79, as quoted in W. Schupbach, "Some Cabinets of Curiosities in European Academic Institutions," The Origins of Museums, The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th and 17th Century Europe, 166.
69. See also Leibniz, "An Odd Thought Concerning a New Sort of Exhibition (1675)," Selections, ed. P. Wiener (New York, 1951), 585-94.
70. Discours de M. Leibniz, sur le projet d'érection d'une Académie Royale à Berlin, sur les moyens de fonder et de faire fleurir cette Société (Histoire de l'académie de Berlin, t. VII, 1752)
71. Opera Omnia, 5: 176-77.
72. "Il est indispensable de fonder des bibliothèques, un théâtre de la nature et de l'art, y compris des cabinets des arts et des raretés, des jardins de plantes et ménageries, des observations et des laboratoires ⋯ Une bibliothèque ne peut pas être ni trop grande ni trop rare, car souvent, dans les moindres livres, on peut trouver quelque bonne chose que les meilleurs mêmes ne renferment pas," Nouvelles lettres et opuscules inedits, 7: 470-71.
73. Cf. also Nouvelles lettres et opuscules inedits, 7: 138-154.
74. Obviously, the curious come in many stripes (and from divergent contexts): some are collectors, others not, some explain their phenomena using powers and virtues, others invoke various mechanisms. The point is that the interest in curiosities was extremely widespread at the time. However, an exception to the culture was Descartes, who clearly disliked the whole business. See K. Pomian, "La culture de la curiosité," Collectionneurs, Amateurs et Curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1987), 61-80. In pp. 78-80 he points out that in Regulae, but especially in La Recherche de la Verité, Descartes is anti-curiosity; cf. title: "par la lumière naturelle qui toute pure et sans emprunter le secours de la religion ni de la philosophie, determine les opinions que doit avoir un honeste homme, touchant les choses qui peuvent occuper sa pensée et penetre jusque dans les secrets des plus curieuses sciences"; R. Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and A. Tannery (Paris, 1964-74), 10: 499: "tout ce qu'on vous peut enseigner de meilleur sur ce sujet, c'est que le désir de savoir, qui est commun à tous les hommes, est une maladie qui ne peut se guérir car la curiosité s'accroit avec la doctrine."
75. Cf. also Discours, pt. vi.
76. M. Mersenne, Question Inouyes (Paris, 1985 [original ed. 1637]), 13-14.