132 Harrison
ter of the enterprise conspired against the attainment of higher status, for
it lacked both the human relevance of civil history and the explanatory
power of natural philosophy. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679) gives some sense of the relative position of natural history
amongst the disciplines: “The register of knowledge of fact is called his-
tory. Whereof there be two sorts: one called natural history... The other,
is civil history; which is the history of the voluntary actions of men in
commonwealths. The registers of science, are such books as contain the
demonstrations of consequences of one affi rmation, to another; and are
commonly called books of philosophy.” Philosophy is itself divided into
a number of categories by Hobbes, the fi rst of which concerns natural
bodies, and which is natural philosophy.^78 The difference between natural
history and natural philosophy is clear from Hobbes’s distinction between
the realm of facts and the realm of the sciences. Natural history, as con-
cerned with mere description, belongs to the former. Natural philosophy,
on the other hand, is a science concerned with causal explanation. In
this understanding of things, one of the prospects for raising the status
of natural history would be to provide it with a role related to the more
elevated goals of natural philosophy. This was more or less the position
of Aristotle, who had understood his History of Animals as prolegomena
to philosophical zoology that would deal with universal judgments rather
than particular and accidental facts.^79 Of more immediate importance,
this was precisely the vision of natural history that Francis Bacon set out
at the beginning of the seventeenth century and that, along with its asso-
ciation with natural theology, provided a source of legitimacy for natural
history for the next two hundred years.
Bacon’s plan for the renovation of the sciences had involved a new
representation of their relations, and his “tree of knowledge” was of ut-
most importance for understandings of the connections between various
branches of knowledge throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. In the sciences concerning nature, pride of place was given to the
history of nature, with Bacon asserting that “the foundation must be laid
in natural history.”^80 This natural history was to be a reformed enterprise
with more strict conditions for the collection of evidence and a proper
arrangement of materials with a view to the service they were to provide
for natural philosophy. Bacon credits Pliny with having been the only
“person who ever undertook a Natural History according to the dignity
of it” but adds that “he was far from carrying out his undertaking in a
manner worthy of the conception.”^81 Bacon’s conclusion was thus that
“all the natural history we have, whether in the mode of inquiry or in
the matter collected, is quite unfi t for the end which I have mentioned,