Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 73

of comprehensive Signs; under which Individuals, according to their Conformity to this

or that abstract Idea, come to be ranked as under Ensigns: so that this is of the Blue, that

the Red Regiment; this is a Man, that a Drill:^111 and in this, I think, consists the whole

business of Genus and Species.^112

Locke discussed, rather interestingly, the presence in species of divergences from
the type.^113 In this he was preceded by Cusa, as we have seen, and also by Francis
Bacon in the New Organon,^114 but Locke’s discussion is surprisingly modern in a
way that Bacon’s is recognizably medieval. He greatly inuenced, among others,
Buffon, through the writings of French admirers of Locke’s empiricism and new way
of ideas (from the Greek ideai, a form of eidos). He is often thought to be solely a
species nominalist, as Buffon transitorily was, but it seems more accurate to say that
he believed our ideas and associated names were conventional, but that, as Bacon
thought, there was some underlying essence that was likely to remain out of our
reach. This idea was famously given its canonical expression in the doctrine of the
noumenal and the phenomenal of Kant.
Locke’s views on relations^115 are also signicant: Although he rejects the idea
that relations are outside the understanding, he nevertheless has a category of
“natural relations” that apply to genealogical relationships between organisms.
Although we only have access to the ideas of these simple and mixed modes, they
are nevertheless something in the natural world. He does assert here that the words
used for the relations, such as “father,” “brother,” and “cousins-germaine,” are con-
ventional, though, even if the relations are not. Relations resurfaced in the writings
of William Hamilton,^116 Russell and Whitehead,^117 and throughout the middle of
the twentieth century.

Wilkins and Ray: Propagation from Seed

John Ray (1627–1705) was a seventeenth-century naturalist who, in conjunction with
nobleman Francis Willughby (1635–1672), prepared the rst systematic ora for a
region—at rst of Cambridgeshire, and later of Britain.^118 In the Historia plantarum
(1686–1704), he and Willughby attempted to describe all known species of plants.
He also collaborated with Willughby, before his untimely death, on a treatment of
insects, animals, and shes. To this end, he needed to dene “species,” and he was
the rst to do so entirely in a biological context. This strongly inuenced Linnaeus’
conceptions of species and other ranks.

(^111) That is, a mandrill, probably referring to baboons.
(^112) Essay III.iv.36.
(^113) Book II, chap. VI, §§16–17, 26–27.
(^114) Book II, §29 [cf. Glass 1959, 36].
(^115) Essay, Book II, chapter XXVIII, §2.
(^116) Hamilton et al. 1874, Vol. 2.
(^117) Whitehead and Russell 1910.
(^118) Raven 1986.