Internalism and Laws of Form 281
animal, and through the hundreds of thousands of different species of plants
and animals, or the skillful accommodation of every part, and of every
organ, in every species, to the purpose which it is meant to serve. The one
leads us to discover the lofty wisdom which planned all things from the
beginning, and the enlarged beneficence reaching over all without respect
of persons; whereas the other impresses us more with the providential care
and special beneficence which, in attending to the whole, has not
overlooked any part, but has made provision for every individual member
of the myriads of animated beings (p. 439).Though mercilessly savaged for intellectual mediocrity by W. S. Gilbert and
other satirists and activists, the British peerage did turn out an occasional scholar
or two. The Duke of Argyll might have won his title fair and square if Gilbert's
ultimate recommendation had ever been instituted. (The Fairy Queen in Iolanthe,
royally pissed off at a group of nobles, threatens: "peers shall teem in Christendom,
and a Duke's exalted station be attainable by competitive examination!") In a
presidential address to the British Association, the good Duke, as a prominent
critic of evolution and author of several books still worth reading today, argued
that relations between both necessary poles of the dichotomy still persisted as a key
issue in Darwin's new biology: "What is the meaning of that great law of adherence
to type and pattern, standing behind, as it were, and in reserve, of that other law by
which organic structures are specially adapted to special modes of life? What is the
relation between these two laws; and can any light be cast upon it derived from the
history of extinct forms; or from the conditions to which we find that existing
forms are subjected?" (quoted in McCosh and Dickie, 1869, p. 68).
Since then, countless events, from meanderings of history to permanencies of
empirical discovery, have rocked this subject back and forth. But equilibrium at a
center of dynamic tension, not of complacent rest, may foster our best biological
understanding, and the Duke's question could not be more current, more a propos.
Unity of Plan as the Strongest Version of Formalism:
The Pre-Darwinian Debate
Mehr Licht on Goethe's Leaf
A prevalent myth of our time proclaims that broad and interdisciplinary visions,
though held in disrepute today, were once valued in a more ecumenical age that
celebrated the "Renaissance man." But the motto that "a cobbler should stick to his
last" * dates from the 4th century BC, and people who wander
*The original version comes from Pliny, quite a "Renaissance man" himself, who
cited Apelles from ca. 325 BC. A last, by the way, is a shoemaker's model foot, not an
abstract statement about stubbornness. The original—ne supra crepidam sutor
iudicaret—literally states that a cobbler should not judge above his last, and therefore
includes some social bias amidst its narrowness.