Species

48 Species

For example, dogs and the other animals of the same species are united by virtue of

the common specic nature which is in them. This nature would be contracted in them

even if Plato’s intellect had not, from a comparison of likenesses, formed for itself a

species. Therefore, with respect to its own operation, understanding follows being and

living; for [merely] through its own operation understanding can bestow neither being

nor living nor understanding.^7

Species are real, independent of the mind, and living species are caused by their
“common specic nature.” Cusa thus answers Porphyry’s question: the understand-
ing gathers species and genera together through comparison, so that these universals
are likenesses of nature. Genera and species exist both in the mind and in nature.

Therefore, in understanding, it unfolds, by resembling signs and characters, a certain

resembling world, which is contracted in it.^8

Later, in Book III, Cusa denes the universe itself as existing “contractedly in
plurality,” unlike God, who is “the Oneness of the Maximum” existing “absolutely
in itsel f ”:

Now, the many things in which the universe is actually contracted cannot at all agree

in supreme equality; for then they would cease being many. Therefore, it is necessary

that all things differ from one another—either (1) in genus, species, and number or

(2) in species and number or (3) in number—so that each thing exists in its own number,

weight, and measure. Hence, all things are distinguished from one another by degrees,

so that no thing coincides with another. Accordingly, no contracted thing can partici-

pate precisely in the degree of contraction of another thing, so that, necessarily, any

given thing is comparatively greater or lesser than any other given thing. Therefore, all

contracted things exist between a maximum and a minimum, so that there can be pos-

ited a greater and a lesser degree of contraction than [that of] any given thing.^9

No individual member of a species, since it would be a contracted thing, can
therefore exhibit or instantiate all the features of the species, and so there is in the
actual organisms of a species (or members of any non-biological species) variation
in the degree to which they participate in the specic essence. According to Cusa,
then, there is variation both within and between taxa. Here we see the beginnings of
the “type” concept—while the type itself is denable in terms of some necessary and
sufcient conditions, “members” of the type can diverge from it or not instantiate it
fully. The only limit “of species, of genera, or of the universe” is “the Center, the
Circumference, and the Union of all things.”
We see also the underlying assumption of the Great Chain of Being. Cusa holds
that each genus has a species that is “highest,” which is coincidental with the lowest

(^7) Hopkins 1981, §126.
(^8) This brings to mind Donne’s much later use of the phrase, “the world’s contracted thus” in his poem
“The Sunne Rising” (c. 1605). Donne was a one for lamenting the loss of the older medieval categories
of thought, famously complaining in his “Anatomy of the World” (1611) that all coherence was gone
with the loss of Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy [Kuhn 1959, 194].
(^9) Hopkins 1981, §182.