Species

98 Species

For animals whose variety is so great that an equal number of separate creations

would have been necessary for their existence could indeed belong to a nominal fam-

ily grouping [Nominalgattung, lit. nominal genus] but never to a real one, other than

one as to which at least the possibility of descent from a single common pair is to be

assumed. ... [Otherwise] the singular compatibility of the generative forces of two spe-

cies (which, although quite foreign as to origins, yet can be fruitfully mated with each

other) would have to be assumed with no other explanation than that nature so pleases.

If, in order to demonstrate this latter supposition, one points to animals in which cross-

ing can happen despite the [supposed] difference of their original stems, he will in

every case reject the hypothesis and, so much the more because such a fruitful union

occurs, infer the unity of the group, as from the crossing of dogs and foxes, etc. The

unfailing inheritance of peculiarities of both parents is thus the only true and at the

same time adequate touchstone of the unity of the group from which they have sprung:

namely the original seeds [Keime] inherent in this group developing in a succession of

generations without which those hereditary variations would not have originated and

would presumably not necessarily have become her e d it a r y.^226

The preformationist debate looms large here; the environment does not make the
species, but only races or varieties.^227 What counts for a natural species is that all
members share the “seeds” (Keime) of the original couple, in whom the species was
preformed at Creation. This is a classic exemplar of the generative conception of
species, based on “seeds” with a generative force unique to that kind, which featured
prominently in John Ray’s initial biological denition of species.
The Critique of Pure Reason was rst published in 1781, the same year as
Blumenbach’s race work. A second edition^228 followed in 1787, and it is this ver-
sion that we will follow here. In the context of discussion of whether a fundamental
power exists which unites the things of understanding, Kant asks whether reason
derives the unity of things by transcendental employment of understanding; in other
words, if parsimony is a law of nature as well as of reason. He answers that unity is a
necessity, for otherwise we would have no reason at all, and launches into a standard
account of genera and species:

That the manifold respects in which individual things differ do not exclude identity of

species, that the various species must be regarded merely as different determinations

of a few genera, and these, in turn, of still higher genera, and so on; in short that we

must seek for a certain systematic unity of all possible empirical concepts, in so far as

they can be deduced from higher and more general concepts—this is a logical prin-

ciple, a rule of the Schools, without which there can be no employment of reason.^229

Kant equivocates here, it seems. On the one hand, he wants to adopt the classical

process of differentiation from the summum genera employed by the Scholastics. On

the other, he wants to derive unity from empirical data, that is, to classify from the bot-

tom up. Parsimony is an advance, as when chemists reduce all salts to acids and alkalis

(^226) Translated in Greene 1959, 233.
(^227) For a good review see Gasking 1967.
(^228) Kant 1933, B679–690. The page numbers of the second edition are conventionally preceded by the
letter B, and of the rst edition, by the letter A.
(^229) Op. cit. B679f.