Species

72 Species

constitutions, or anything else but their obvious appearances; since languages, in all

countries, have been established long before sciences. So that they have not been phi-

losophers or logicians, or such who have troubled themselves about forms and essences,

that have made the general names that are in use amongst the several nations of men:

but those more or less comprehensive terms have, for the most part, in all languages,

received their birth and signication from ignorant and illiterate people, who sorted

and denominated things by those sensible qualities they found in them; thereby to

signify them, when absent, to others, whether they had an occasion to mention a sort

or a particular thing.^109

Locke here recognizes a distinction between folk taxonomy and a proper (philo-
sophical) enquiry into the scientic issues. Leibniz in the New Essay on Human
Understanding^110 paraphrases this more succinctly (Philolethes is Locke, Theophilus
is L eibn iz):

PHIL. §25. Languages were established before sciences, and things were put into spe-

cies by ignorant and illiterate people.

To which he responds,

THEO. This is true, but the people who study a subject-matter correct popular notions.

Assayers have found precise methods for identifying and separating metals, botanists

have marvelously extended our knowledge of plants, and experiments have been made

on insects that have given us new routes into the knowledge of animals. However, we

are still far short of halfway along our journey.

Leibniz is more of an optimist about the causal powers that form species being
available to investigators than Locke, who seems to propose a permanent conven-
tionalism based on the current inability to dene species according to their “internal
real constitutions.” Nevertheless, Leibniz held to a view that species were not real
as discrete objects. He was an adherent of the scala naturae as the Great Chain of
Being was known in Latin, and popularized the lex completio—that there could be
no incompleteness in the world as made by a benecent God.
Locke effectively argued that species were simply names we gave to similarities
in perceived phenomena:

Nature makes the similitudes of substances. This, then, in short, is the Case: Nature

makes many particular Things, which do agree one with another in many sensible

Qualities, and probably too in their internal Frame and Constitution: but it is not

this real Essence that distinguishes them into Species; it is Men who, taking occasion

from the Qualities they nd united in them, and wherein they observe often several

Individuals to agree, range them into sorts, in order to their Naming, for the convenience

(^109) Book III, chap. 6, §25.
(^110) Leibniz 1996, 319.