The Nineteenth Century, a Period of Change 123singularities; and we move upwards through the essences of genus and species to a
highest genus. Eidetic singularities are essences, which indeed have necessarily “more
general” essences as their genera, but no further specifications in relation to which
they themselves might be genera (proximate or mediate, higher genera). Likewise that
genus is the highest which no longer has any genus above it.^39More interestingly, and influentially on the subsequent debate, Joseph’s
Introduction to Logic allowed that the evolutionary species of Darwin and Spencer
were a different notion to that of the logical species of definitions. He goes so far as
to note that species in biology cannot be defined, and that instead one must describe
a type, from which individuals can diverge. Joseph continues in the tradition of
Whately, separating logical species defined by essence and biological species des-
cribed by types. Even at this late stage, types and essences are explicitly held to be
different notions. Until Woodger introduces symbolic logic to biology,^40 such issues
are discussed by a declining number of philosophers; and then of course later in the
context both of cladism and the individuality thesis.
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck: Unreal Species Change
No sooner had natural history established a tradition of fixism of species than it was
immediately under challenge, for example, by Pierre Maupertuis in Vénus Physique
i n 1745.^41 At the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a considerable amount of
ferment over the notions of taxonomic groups or ranks. For example, Blumenbach
had classified the human species into races—Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian,
American, and Malayan—and yet he still regarded these types as subordinate to
the human species, and that all were varieties of that species,^42 although Buffon had
previously denied that the notion of “race” applied to the usual human groupings.^43
Blumenbach’s conception of the species was that it was formed through the action of
a formative force, a nisus formativus, and so his is also a generative notion of species.
More influentially, Lamarck delivered a transmutationist view of species, and fol-
lowed his mentor Buffon in supposing that there were no realities attaching to the
term. In the Zoological Philosophy (Philosophie Zoologique, 1809) he writes:
It is not a futile purpose to decide definitely what we mean by the so-called species
among living bodies, and to enquire if it is true that species are of absolutely constancy,
as old as nature, and have all existed from the beginning just as we see them to-day; or
if as a result of changes in their environment, albeit extremely slow, they have not in
the course of time changed their characters and shape....(^39) Husserl 1931.
(^40) Woodger 1937, Woodger 1952.
(^41) Maupertuis 1745. Bear in mind this is only ten years after Linnaeus’ first edition of the Systema
naturae.
(^42) Nordenskiöld 1929, 306, Voegelin 1998.
(^43) Roger 1997, 177f.