132 Paul Sheldon Davies
except to say that they must come from a deity clever enough to design and manufacture
such forms. Blumenbach’s view, though less transparent than Paley’s, offers more or less
the same “explanation.” The emergence and perpetuation of living forms, according to
Blumenbach, comes from a nonmechanical power potent enough to cause the perpetuation
of living forms, though nothing about the actual workings of this power is ever revealed
to us.
The claim that Blumenbach’s theory is analogous in this way to Paley’s theory confl icts
with the views of some contemporary scholars. Peter McLaughlin (1990), for example,
claims that Blumenbach’s postulation of a nonmechanical life force was not a step outside
the natural order—and thus utterly disanalogous to Paley’s appeal to God—but rather a
way of expanding and enriching our view of the natural order. The natural order, as con-
ceptualized by our late-eighteenth-century predecessors, was constituted mainly from the
apparently irreducible elements of Newton’s mechanics. Blumenbach’s view, according to
McLaughlin, seeks to expand our view of the natural order by including a fundamental
and irreducible formative power. This formative power is irrelevant to the physics of
nonliving things, to be sure, where Newton’s mechanics carry the explanatory burden, but
it is essential to our ability to produce a reductive, scientifi c explanation of the perpetua-
tion and purposiveness of living forms, where Newton’s mechanics are not enough. And
it is precisely the analogy to Newton’s claim concerning gravity that Blumenbach gives
in support of his formative power.^6
McLaughlin may be right that this is how Blumenbach intended us to interpret his pos-
tulation of a formative power. I am not convinced, however, that this really is Blumen-
bach’s view, since I am not convinced that his positing a formative power was defensible
even relative to the standards of his own day.^7 There is, after all, considerable distance
between Newton’s argument for gravity and Blumenbach’s argument for a formative
power. Newton insists we should accept that gravity is real because 1) doing so helps
explain the behavior of all observable objects by positing a property of attraction that is
relatively simple, and 2) this relatively simple property of attraction may, with further
progress in knowledge, yield to a mechanistic explanation. The content of Blumenbach’s
proposal is quite different, for neither (1) nor (2) are true of it.
Begin with (2). Blumenbach is explicit that his formative power, whatever else it might
be, is entirely nonmechanical. This is no small difference. Newton was not giving us a
fully fl eshed account of what gravity is; he was admitting that, though he had not yet dis-
covered the source of gravity, he expected that it would someday yield to a mechanistic
explanation. (It is true, of course, that Newton also admitted that we would need to appeal
to the infl uence of God if the search for a mechanistic explanation failed. But the appeal
to God is a last resort.) Blumenbach, however, was not expressing his or our ignorance;
he was instead positively asserting that his formative power was not mechanical. He did
so, moreover, without giving us any idea what a nonmechanical formative power might
be. We have some idea what the realm of mechanics comprises because we are told, for