Mt. Holyoke College

History 256

Robert Schwartz

September 23, 2005

Heidi Fuchs

	Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution	Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility
Main Point	From an ecological and feminist perspective, Merchant examines the shift from an organic to a mechanistic worldview in early modern Europe, chiefly Italy, England and France. An organic cosmology, which saw the universe as a living structure of interrelated elements, experienced new popularity during the Renaissance (15^th and 16^th centuries). It was then undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture in the late 16^th and 17^th centuries, resulting in the titular death of nature as a living being in the new mechanistic conception of being; disorderly, active nature was forced to submit to humans, who imposed rationality and order using principles derived from scientific observation. The world – indeed the universe – was now seen as a inert machine made up of solitary and discrete components. Such is the established premise; Merchant’s contribution is to provide a ‘history of ideas’ as well as ecofeminist criticism, in the hopes that some elements of organicism are germane to current debates about the changed environment and our place in it.  She claims that the mechanistic worldview cleared the way for the exploitation of human and natural resources in the name of progress. First and foremost, she traces several intellectual movements and focuses upon several philosophers of this fundamental shift in worldview.	Thomas’s work is chiefly an analysis of anthropocentrism’s fall; he observes the erosion of a premodern sensibility on English soil. The occidental world, and England in particular, is optimal for a case study because England was heavily agricultural and experienced the Industrial Revolution before other continental nations. Thomas’s scrutiny of sensibilities can be roughly broken down into three stages. By the end of the 16^th century, man was seen to rest inarguably at the top of the “chain of life”: the world had been created by God for man’s sake and the subordinance of other species went unchallenged. Theologians and intellectuals of this Tudor era (1485-1603) interpreted classical philosophers and the Bible’s depiction of creation as rationale in asserting man’s authority. This idea of unquestioned human primacy in the natural world persisted until the last third of the 17^th century. In the second stage, the uniqueness of man was propounded most famously by Descartes. In an increasingly mechanistic world, the dignity of human nature was preserved by asserting the difference between man (with speech, reason, and a soul) and animal (a machine). From around 1740 on, however, as scientific and geologic discoveries began to confuse the world order, such anthropocentric notions slowly dissipated. Traditional morality based upon the Bible – and the Christian stewardship of the natural world – began to give way to more secular explanations for man’s place in the world; similarly, the religious idea of charity was replaced by the secularized one of benevolence.
Evidence	In a synthesis it is self-defeating to point to minute textual examples, but a broad outline of Merchant’s evidence is appropriate. Merchant discusses holistic (or premechanic) views of nature in Chapter 4. She grounds organic thought of the Renaissance in Greek conceptions of the cosmos as a living unity, drawing on Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. Neo-Platonism, which flourished under patronage of the Medicis, is illustrated by references to Agrippa, Della Porta, and Thomas Vaughan (p106). Naturalism challenged the hierarchical nature of Neo-Platonism; nature was seen by Telesio, Campanella, and Bruno as a “growing, changing, and evolving organism” (p115). Her explanation of Vitalism is informed by Paracelsus, van Helmond, and Conway – matter and spirit are here unified (p117). Dissolution of an old order and the descent into a terrifying, disordered world led to the rejection of organicists’ views. In their place was substituted mechanism. In Chapter 7, Merchant uses rich and varied examples of Francis Bacon’s writings to illustrate the nonegalitarian, anthropocentric views of mechanism. A passage from his New Atlantis (1624) reveals it is just and good that man control nature: “We make (by art) in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers to come earlier and later than their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make them by art greater much than their nature…” (p184). Chapter 8 draws upon Gassendi, Descartes, and Hobbes in chronicling the evolution of Bacon’s ideas into the 1640s and beyond. Nature as mechanical framework led to a similar framework of political values exemplified in Hobbes’ Leviathan – a mechanical model of society based on laws was to rectify the brutishness of man’s natural state (p209).	Thomas draws upon an astounding variety of literature for evidence, so only a few choice bits can be mentioned here. He draws upon text from Genesis to make the argument of God sanctioning man’s ascendancy (p18). In an example of everything being for human utility, the purpose of oxen’s existence was only to provide food for a nobler beast (i.e., man), according to Archbishop King (p21). The Cartesian view of animals as automata was in fact not accepted by the majority of Englishmen; John Howe granted it piety but not cogency. Yet the naturalist William Bingley claimed “the barrier which separates men from brutes is fixed and immutable” (p35). Thomas sees the radical idea that cruelty to animals is wrong regardless of human costs not just in Porphyry, Plutarch, and Montaigne, but in Dives and Pauper, a moral treatise on the ten commandments written before 1410(!). He concludes a coherent attitude remained constant between the 15^th and 19^th centuries: man was not to cause unnecessary suffering (p153). Kind treatment of animals was a religious duty; George Wither’s poem (p156) exemplifies this. Out of this anthropocentric tradition arose a new conviction when the world lost its previous boundaries and illusorily short history. Thomas’s cataloguing of scientific discovery is not only fascinating but provides a WHY for the evolution of new ideas. Astronomers, botanists, and explorers all introduced men to new realms of experience, but geology would strike the death knell for the version of Creation in Genesis. Thomas Story, in 1738, was sure that the earth was much older than the 7,000 years given by Scripture (p168). With the growth of cities came increased desire for the countryside, as cities were places of filth, vice, and din (p244-5). Town dwellers began to see weeds as beautiful (“Better to me the meanest weed / that blows upon its mountain” Tennyson, p273) and idealization of this sort contributed to a fledgling conservation movement. By 1800, though many mourned the effects of unchecked industrialism on the environment, most maintained that human interests remained most important; G.M. Trevelyan claimed that conservation should proceed for the sake of humans alone (p302).
Evaluation	Merchant’s book, while interesting, is rather one-sided and it is impossible to ignore her agenda, which heavily influences how she presents sources. As an intellectual historian she contextualizes well a pattern of ideas that changed over time, yet her reading of them remains narrow. She is less interested in why ideas evolve than what we can learn from them today, and she retrospectively castigates Bacon for being patriarchal and representing the entrepreneurial middle classes, when in fact he was no different from others of his time.	Thomas presents an almost overwhelming wealth of ideas which are extremely relevant to debates that still exist today (vegetarianism, factory farming, the conservation movement, and so on and so forth). His use of varied sources provides him with sturdy evidence, but it seems almost profligate and superficial, as he spends little time with many sources instead of going into depth. However, the transition from source to source and idea to idea proceeds seamlessly and his work was a joy to read. I did like how he used poets as a source, because they provide insight into the popular imagination that other, more prosaic sources, may not.
Comparison	These two books are nominally about similar ideas but play them out very differently. Merchant provides the (at times dense) intellectual framework for the shift from organicism to mechanism, whereas Thomas further develops the mechanistic worldview in examining shadings of it in depth. They demonstrate a real difference between intellectual and social history, with postmodern ecofeminist criticism on one hand and a more balanced, yet less challenging, survey of changing sensibilities on the other.