Internalism and Laws of Form 271
instruction, a position so unsullied by nature's real complexities. We know that life
cannot work at such a conceptual extreme, but any consistent and well-argued
defense of such an edge remains fascinating—at least in illustrating a set of mental
habits that still motivates scientists. Just as we learn to grasp nature through
controlled and simplified cases (the experimental method), so may we also
comprehend mind by its defense of coherence at the philosophical endpoint of a
continuum.
LOUIS AGASSIZ AND CONTINENTAL FORMALISM: PRAISING
Grandeur of Taxonomic Order Louis Agassiz and Continental Formalism: Praising God in the
Louis Agassiz, as the first permanent immigrant among great European biological
theorists, became the symbol and actuality of maturation and prestige for American
natural history in the mid 19th century. Romantic mythology proclaims that he
ventured forth as an intrepid pioneer in a quest for pristine knowledge and
uncharted species. In fact, Agassiz's primary reasons for resettlement were far
more mundane—escape from trouble and hope for a new beginning. He had
suffered the two classic reversals of personal misfortune after years of intellectual
triumph: bankruptcy (when his lithographic press, initially established to print the
plates for his Poissons fossiles, failed) and familial strife (when his wife moved out
after he had turned their home into a factory and boarding house for workers at his
press). In any case, whatever the complex motives, Agassiz's decision to settle
permanently at Harvard established a happy incongruity within an expanding and
accepting culture—a great francophone theorist, with traditional continental
attitudes, living in Yankee Boston.
Agassiz (1807-1873) came to America with grand plans to invest his
boundless energy in systematic work on undescribed native faunas, following his
own maxim: "study nature, not books." But, as a consummate academic politician
and promoter, he became sidetracked over the years (an old story, as deep as
human nature itself), and published little technical work during his last two
decades. The frustration in this familiar tale of good intentions lies best exposed in
Agassiz's grandest project and its failure.
Early in the 1850's, he announced plans for a lavish 10-volume work to be
called The Natural History of the United States. He gathered more than 2,000 paid
subscriptions in advance, and began collection (for an initial monograph on turtles)
with his old and characteristic zeal. But he soon bogged down—permanently. Only
four volumes ever appeared (with the descriptive and taxonomic work largely done
by others), and he talked less and less about his grand design as the years ticked
away. Nonetheless, while still imbued with initial enthusiasm, he wrote, as a book-
length introduction to volume 1, his finest theoretical work, the Essay on
Classification. Published in 1857, and revised in 1859 (ironically just 3 months
before publication of Darwin's Origin, the book that would undermine the central
premise of Agassiz's work), the Essay on Classification stands as a unique and
incongruous document—a statement of natural theology in the highest tradition of