Writing A response to ecological questions

THE

IDEA OF NA TURE

BY "

:g. g.. COLLINGWOOD

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1945

INTRODUCTION

§ I. Science and PhilosoPhy IN the history of European thought there have been three periods of constructive cosmological thinking; three periods, that is to say, when the idea of nature has come into the focus of thought, become the subject of intense and protracted reflection, and consequently acquired new characteristics which in their turn have given a new aspect to the detailed science of nature that has been based upon it.

To say that the detailed science of nature is 'based' upon the ide..a .0£ nature does not imp1.y th.aftfie ld.'(;a o{riat~re. i!iJiene~~ the idea of nature as a whole, is worked out first, in abstraction from any detailed study of natural fact, and that when this abstract idea of nature is complete people go on to erect upon it a superstructure of detailed natural science. What it implies is not a temporal relation but a logical one. Here, as often, the temporal relation inverts the logical relation. In natural science, as in economics or morals or law, people begin with the details. They begin by tackling individual problems as they arise. Only when this detail has accumulated to a considerable amount do they reflect upon the work they have been doing and discover that they have been doing it in a methodical way, according to principles of which hitherto they have not been conscious.

But the temporal priority of detailed work to reflection on the principles implied in it must not be exaggerated. It would be an exaggeration, for example, to think that a 'period' of detailed work in natural science, or any other field of thought or action, a 'period' lasting for half a century or even for half a decade, is followed by a 'period> of reflection on the principles which logically underlie it. Such a contrast between 'periods' of non-philosophical thinking and subsequent t periods' of philosophizing is perhaps what Hegel meant to assert in his famous lament, at the end of the Preface to the Philosophic des Rechts: 'When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a form of life has aged; and grey in grey does not enable us to make it young again, but only to know it. The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at the coming of dusk.' If that was what Hegel meant, he made a mistake: and a mistake which Marx only turned

B

2 INTRODUCTION

upside down and did not correct when he wrote that cphilosoph~~. hitherto has confined itself to interpreting the world: the point, however, is to change it' (Theses on F euerbach, xi). The complaint against philosophy is borrowed, in the very same words, from Hegel; only what Hegel represents as a necessary feature of all philosophy Marx represents as a defect to which philosophy was subject until he, Marx, revolutionized it.

In fact, the detailed work seldom goes on for any length of time without reflection intervening. And this reflection reacts upon the detailed work; for when people become conscious of the prin- ciplesupon which they have been thinking or acting they become conscious of something which in these thoughts and actions they have been trying, though unconsciously, to do: namely to work out in detail the logical implications ofthose principles. To strong minds this new consciousness gives a new strength, namely a new firmness in their approach to the detailed problems. To weak minds it adds a new temptation, the temptation to that kind of pedantry which consists in remembering the principle and for- getting the special features of the problem to which it is applied.

The detailed study of natural fact is commonly called natural science, or for short simply science; the reflection on principles, whether those of natural science or of any other department of thought or action, is commonly called philosophy. Talking in these terms, and restricting philosophy for the moment to reflec- tion on the principles of natural science, what I have just said may be put py saying that natural science must come first in order that philosophy may have something to reflect on; but that the two things are so closely related that natural science cannot go on for long without philosophy beginning; and that philosophy reacts on the science out of which it has grown by giving it in future a new firmness and consistency arising out of the scientist's new consciousness of the principles on which he has been working.

For this reason it cannot be well that natural science should be assigned exclusively to one class of persons called scientists and philosophy to another class called philosophers .. A man who has never reflected on the principles of his work has not achieved a grown-up man's attitude towards it; a scientist who has never philosophized about his science can never be more than a second-hand, imitative, journeyman scientist. A man who has never enjoyed a certain type of experience cannot reflect upon it;

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 3 a philosopher who has never studied and worked at natural science cannot philosophize about it without making a fool of himself.

Before the nineteenth century the more eminent and dis- t4nguished scientists at least had always to some extent philo- sophized about their science, as their writings testify. And inasmuch as they regarded natural science as their main work, it is reasonable to assume that these testimonies understate the extent of their philosophizing. In the nineteenth century a fashion grew up of separating natural scientists and philosophers into two professional bodies, each knowing little about the other's work and having little sympathy with it. It is a bad fashion that has done harm to both sides, and on both sides there is an earnest desire to see the last of it and to bridge the gulf of misunderstanding it has created. The bridge must be begun from both ends; and I, as a member of the philosophical profession, can best begin at my end by philosophizing about what experience I have of natural science. Not being a pro- fessional scientist, I know that I am likely to make a fool of myself; but the work of bridge-building must go on.

§ 2. The Greek view of nature

Greek natural science was based on the principle that the world of nature is saturated or permeated by mind. Greek thinkers regarded the presence of mind in nature as the source of that regularity or orderliness in the natural world whose presence made a science of nature possible. The world of nature they regarded as a world of bodies in motion. The motions in themselves, according to Greek ideas, were due to vitality or 'soul'; but motion in itself is one thing, they believed, and orderliness another. They conceived mind, in all its manifesta- tions, whether in human affairs or elsewhere, as a ruler, a dominating or regula,ting element, imposing order first upon itself and then upon everything belonging to it, primarily its own b~dy and secondarily that body's environment.

Since the world of nature is a world not only of ceaseless motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or regular motion, they accordingly said that the world of nature is not only alive but intelligent; not only a vast animal with a 'soul' or life of its own, but a rational animal with a (mind' of its own. The life and intelligence of creatures inhabiting the

4 INTRODUCTION

earth's surface and the regions adjacent to it, they argued, represent a specialized local organization of this all-pervading vitality and rationality, so that a plant or animal, according to their ideas, participates in its own degree psychically in the life- process of the world's 'soul' and intellectually in the activity of the world's' mind', no less than it participates materially in the physical organization of the world's 'body'.

That vegetables and animals are physically akin to the earth is a belief shared by ourselves with the Greeks; but the notion of a psychical and intellectual kinship is strange to us, and constitutes a difficulty in the way of our understanding the relics of Greek natural science which we find in their literature.

§ 3. The Renaissance view of Nature

The second of the three cosmological movements mentioned at the beginning of this chapter took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I propose to designate its view of nature by the name of 'Renaissance' cosmology. The name is not a good one, because the word 'Renaissance' is applied to an earlier phase in the history of thought, beginning in Italy with the humanism of the fourteenth century and continuing, in the same country, with the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies of that century and the fifteenth. The cosmology I have now to describe was in principle a reaction against these and might, perhaps, be more accurately called' post-Renaissance'; but this is a clumsy term.

Historians of art have lately been using, for some part of the period with which I am concerned, the adjective 'baroque'; but this is a word borrowed from the technicalities of formal logic as a term of contempt for a certain kind of bad taste prevalent in the seventeenth century, and its adoption as a descriptive epithet for the natural science of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton would be 'bien baroque'.l The word 'gothic', as applied to medieval architecture, succeeded in divesting itself of its original significance and becoming a term merely descrip- tive of a certain style; but no one, I think, ever proposed to call

I Saint-Simon, apud Littre, quoted in Croce, Storia delta Eta barocca in Italia (Bari, 1928), p. 22. Cf. Encyclopedia: 'L'idee d.u baroque entratne avec soi celle du ridicule pousse a l'exces.' And Francesco l\1ilizia, Dizionario delle belle arti del rlisegno (1797): 'Barocco e il superlativo del bizzarro, l'eccesso del ridicolo.' Both quoted in Croce, op. cit., p. 23.

THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 5

the work of Aquinas or Scotus 'gothic philosophy'; and even as applied to architecture the term is now disappearing. So I shall use the term 'Renaissance', with this definition of my meaning and this apology for departing from established usage.

The Renaissance view of nature began to take shape as antithetical to the Greek view in the work of Copernicus (1473- 1543), Telesio (I508-88), and Bruno (1548-I600). The central point of this antithesis was the denial that the world of nature, the world studied by physical science, is an organism, and the assertion that it is devoid both of intelligence and of life. It is therefore incapable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and indeed incapable of moving itself at alL The move- ments which it exhibits, and which the physicist investigates, are imposed upon it from without, and theirregularity is due to 'laws of nature' likewise imposed from without. Instead of being an organism, the natural world is a machine: a machine in the literal and proper sense of the word, an arrangement of bodily parts designed and put together and set going for a definite purpose by an intelligent mind outside itself. The Renaissance thinkers, like the Greeks, saw in the orderliness of the natural world an expression of intelligence: but for the Greeks this intelligence was nature's own intelligence, for the Renaissance thinkers it was the intelligence of something other than nature: the divine creator and ruler of nature. This distinction is the key to all the main differences between Greek and Renaissance natural science.

Each of these cosmological movements was followed by a movement in which the focus of interest shifted from nature to mind. In the history of Greek thought this shift took place with Socrates. Whereas previous thinkers had not neglected ethics, politics, or even logic and the theory of knowledge, they had concentrated their main effort of thought upon the theory of nature. Socrates reversed this emphasis and concentrated his thought on ethics and logic; and from his time onwards, although the theory of nature was by no means forgotten even by Plato, who did far more work on that subject than is generally realized, the theory of mind predominated, and the theory of nature took the second place.

This Greek theory of mind in Socrates and his successors was intimately connected with and conditioned by the results already obtained in the theory of nature. The mind that was

6 INTRODUCTION

studied by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was always first and foremost mind in nature, the mind in the body and of the body, manifesting itself by its control of the body; and when these philosophers found themselves obliged to recognize mind as transcending body, they stated this discovery in a way that shows unmistakably how paradoxical it seemed to them and how remote from their habitual or (as we sometimes say) 'instinctive' ways of thinking. Socrates in Plato's dialogues over and over again expects to be met with incredulity and misunderstanding when he sets out to assert that rational soul or mind operates independently of the body: either when he is discussing the theory of knowledge and contrasts the bodily mind of appetite and sense with the pure intellectual appre- hension of the forms which is effected by the rational soul's wholly independent and self-contained activity without any help from the body, or when he is expounding the doctrine of immortality and asserting that the rational soul enjoys an eternal life unaffected by the birth or death of the body belonging to it.

The same tone is found in Aristotle, who treats it as a matter of course that the C soul' should be defined as the entelechy of an organic body-that is, the self-maintaining activity of an organism-but speaks as one expounding mysterious and difficult doctrine when he says that the intellect or reason, vovs, although in some sense it is a part of the C soul', possesses no bodily organ and is not acted upon, as sense is, by its proper objects (De Anima4z9aIS seqq.) so that it is nothing apart from its activity of thinking (ibid. ZI-Z) and is 'separable' from the body (ibid. 4zgbS). All this shows whatfrom a general knowledge of pre-Socratic physics we should expect: that Greek thinkers in general take it for granted that mind belongs essentially to body and lives with it in the closest union, and that when they are confronted with reasons for thinking this union partial, occa- sional, or precarious, they are puzzled to know how this can be.

In Renaissance thought this state of things is precisely reversed. For Descartes body is one substance and mind is another. Each works independently of the other according to its own laws. Just as the fundamental axiom of Greek thought about mind is its immanence in body, so the fundamental axiom of Descartes is its transcendence. Descartes knows very

THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 7

well that transcendence must not be pushed to the point of dualism; the two things must be connected somehow; but cosmologically he can find no connexion short of God, and in the individual human being he is driven to the desperate expedient, justly ridiculed by Spinoza, of finding it in the pineal gland, which he thinks must be the organ of union between body and soul because, as an anatomist, he can find no other function for it.

Even Spinoza, with his insistence on the unity of substance, is in no better case; for thought and extension are in his philosophy two utterly distinct attributes of this one substance, and each, as an attribute, completely transcends the other. Hence when in the eighteenth century the centre of gravity in philosophical thought swung over from the theory of nature to the theory of mind, Berkeley being the critical point here as Socrates was for the Greeks, the problem of nature inevitably stated itself in this form: how can mind have any connexion with something utterly alien to itself, something essentially mechanical and non~mental, namely nature? This was the question, at bottom the only question, concerning nature which exercised the great philosophers of mind, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel.ln every case their answer was at bottom the same: namely, that mind makes nature; nature is, so to speak, a by- product of the autonomous and self-existing activity of mind.

I shall discuss this idealistic view of nature more fully here~ after; all I wish to make clear at this point is that there are two things which it never meant. It never meant that nature is in itself mental, made of the stuff of mind; on the contrary, it set out from the assumption that nature is radically non- mental or mechanical, and never went back on that assumption, but always maintained that nature is essentially alien to mind, mind's other or opposite. Secondly it never meant that nature is an illusion or dream of mind, something non~existent: on the contrary, it always maintained that nature really is what it seems to be: it is the work of mind and not existing in its own right, but a work really produced and, because really produced, really existing.

A warning against these two errors is needed because they have been over and over again taught as truths in modern books whose authors are so much obsessed by the ideas of the

8 INTRODUCTION

twentieth century that they simply cannot understand those of the eighteenth. They are, in a way, none the worse for this; it is progress, of a sort, that people should have got right away from the thoughts of their great-grandfathers; but that is not a kind of progress which qualifies people for making historical statements about the ideas which they have ceased to under- stand; and when they venture to make such statements, and to say that for Hegel ' material characteristics are delusive appear- ances of certain mental characteristics' (C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature, Ig28, p. 624) or that according to Berkeley , experience of green is entirely indistinguishable from green' (G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922, p. 14, where Berkeley is not named, but seems to be meant) respect for their personal attainments and their academic positions must not blind a reader to the fact that they are publishing untrue statements about something they have not understood.

The Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was based on an analogy: an analogy between the world of nature and the individual human being, who begins by finding certain characteristics in himself as an individual, and goes on to think of nature as possessed of similar characteristics. By the work of his own self-consciousness he comes to think of himself as a body whose parts are in constant rhythmic motion, these motions being delicately adjusted to each other so as to preserve the vitality of the whole: and at the same time he finds himself to be a mind directing the activity of this body in accordance with its own desires. The world of nature as a whole is then explained as a macrocosm analogous to this microcosm.

The Renaissance view of nature as a machine is equally analogical in its origin, but it presupposes a quite different order of ideas. First, it is based on the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God. Secondly, it is based on the human experience of designing and constructing machines. The Greeks and Romans were not machine-users, except to a very small extent: their catapults and water-clocks were not a prominent enough feature of their life to affect the way in which they conceived the relation between themselves and the world. But by the sixteenth century the Industrial Revolution was well on the way. The printing-press and the windmill, the lever, the pump, and the pulley, the clock and the wheel-

THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 9 barrow, and a host of machines in use among miners and engineers were established features of daily life. Everyone understood the nature of a machine, and the experience of making and using such things had become part of the general consciousness of European man. It was an easy step to the proposition: as a c10ckmaker or millwright is to a clock or mill, so is God to Nature.

§ 4. The Modern view of Nature The modern view of Nature owes something both to Greek

and to Renaissance cosmology, but it differs from each in fundamental ways. To describe the differences with precision is not easy, because the movement is still young and has not yet had the time to ripen its ideas for systematic statement. We are confronted not so much with a new cosmology as with a large number of new cosmological experiments, all very dis- concerting if looked at from the Renaissance point of view, and all to some extent animated by what we can recognize as a single spirit; but to define this spirit is very difficult. We can, however, describe the kind of experience on which it is based, and so indicate the starting-point of this movement.

Modern cosmology, like its predecessors, is based on an analogy. What is new about it is that the analogy is a new one. As Greek natural science was based on the analogy between the macrocosm' nature and the microcosm man, as man is revealed to himself in his own self-consciousness; as Renaissance natural science was based on the analogy between nature as God's handiwork and the machines that are the handiwork of man (the same A nalogy which in the eighteenth century was to become the presupposition of Joseph Butler's masterpiece I) ; so the modern view of nature, which first begins to find expression towards the end of the eighteenth century and ever since then has been gathering weight and establishing itself more securely down to the present day, is based on the analogy between the processes of the natural world as studied by natural scientists and the vicissitudes of human affairs as studied by historians.

Like the Renaissance analogy, this could only begin to operate

I 'This method then ... being evidently conclusive ..• my design is to apply it ... taking for provea, that there is an intelligent Author of Nature' (my italics); op. cit., Introduction, paragraph 10 (Oxford ed., 1897, p. 10).