Abstract
François Duchesneau’s paper gives us a picture of the way Leibniz’s theories of machines of nature, monads, and organic bodies came to influence naturalists in the early eighteenth century. A key figure in this transition was Louis Bourguet, a correspondent of Leibniz and Swiss natural philosopher who recast Antonio Vallisneri’s views on preformation and generation in Leibnizian mould. In his Lettres philosophiques (1729), Bourguet developed a systematic conception of what he termed the “organic mechanism of plants and animals” to differentiate it from formative processes taking place in the inorganic world, such as crystallizations. His elaborate analyses of the generative processes that characterize plants and animals influenced later theorists, such as Buffon and Bonnet.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bourguet (1729).
- 2.
Quoted in Roger (1971, 373).
- 3.
Quoted in Roger (1971, 374)
- 4.
“From a strictly scientific perspective, Vallisneri brought, ultimately, nothing more than a very lucid clarification, and what is interesting in his intervention resides mainly in his general reflections on the knowledge of nature, to which he found himself driven. In particular, he did not pay special attention to the question of the development of the pre-existing germ” (Roger 1971, 375–376).
- 5.
See Generali (1987, 125–140).
- 6.
See the letter, Leibniz to Bourguet, 3 January 1714, GP III, 562: “Mr Vallisnieri is very solid. He contradicts Mr. Leeuwenhoek on seminal animals; but I would want the fact to be made clearer, regarding eggs as much as these animals. I am nevertheless certain that an organic body is never formed from chaos or from an inorganic body, and even that there is chaos only in appearance.” See also the letter, Leibniz to Bourguet, 22 March 1714, GP III, 565: “[…] were that to be true, the question would always remain, if the basis of transformation or preformed life is in the ovary, as per Mr Vallisnieri, or in the sperm, as per Leeuwenhoek. Because I maintain that there must always be preformed life, be it plant or animal, as the basis of transformation, and including the same dominant monad: no-one is more apt to elucidate this doubt than Mr Vallisnieri, and I wish greatly to soon see his dissertation; to be the object of its dedication would honour me more than I deserve.” See, finally, the letter, Leibniz to Bourguet, 11 July 1714, GP III, 571: “I would be most curious to one day learn to what Mr Vallisnieri objected to in Mr Leeuwenhoek, and I would strongly wish that this should appear while Mr Leeuwenhoek is still alive […] I do not know whether these animals that find themselves in the semen of larger animals perform the function attributed to them by Mr Leeuwenhoek, but I do believe that, if this function is not performed by these animals, there are other, invisible ones who perform something similar, since it appears that we cannot avoid a pre-existing animal.”
- 7.
Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel, ms. 1282, cc. 219–220, quoted in Generali (1987, 130 n. 29).
- 8.
This approach is clearly present in the letter of Leibniz to Bourguet, 5 August 1715, GP III, 579: “I could not say anything about the details of animal generation. All that I believe to be able to assert is that the soul of every animal is pre-existent and has been in an organic body that, ultimately, by way of many changes, involutions, and evolutions, has become the current animal.”
- 9.
See the letter, Leibniz to Bourguet, 3 January 1714, GP III, 562, quoted in Duchesneau (1998, 328).
- 10.
Cf. Bourguet (1729, 88): “And even if Mr Vallisneri admits with much frankness that he has never seen the eggs of viviparous animals in their cells, I suspect that the yellow or glandulous body is the egg itself covered in a film and that the triangle that this learned man has found in its centre corresponds to the one we see in the eggs of oviparous animals. If this idea of the embryo supported by the analogy of the nucleus and the seed occurs, as I believe all experts will admit, the retortion could not subsist as the proportions in the embryo’s growth are better retained in our system than in the one we reject.”
- 11.
On the invention of dynamics, see Duchesneau (1994, III–IV).
- 12.
Concerning the Leibnizian interpretation of the great chain of beings, see Duchesneau (1993, 359–74; and 1995, 47–59).
- 13.
According to Bourguet’s formula (Duchesneau 1993, 167): “[…] reason and freedom in the choice of the objects within its reach.”
- 14.
On the Gassendist theory of generation, see, among others, Duchesneau (1998, 85–118).
- 15.
See French (1994).
- 16.
It has been emphasized several times that the concepts used here by Bourguet will have a significant new life in a neo-epigenetist context, notably in the theory of generation expounded by Buffon in the second volume (1749) of L’histoire naturelle générale et particulière. See, for example, Roger (1971, 378 and 546).
- 17.
To counter the mechanism applied to the conception of living beings, Le Clerc had taken on the task of exhuming Ralph Cudworth’s major work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), and of publishing synopses of it in Bibliothèque choisie (1703–1706). Following the same line of thought, he supplied excerpts from naturalist Nehemiah Grew’s Cosmologia sacra (1701). Suspecting that atheism would benefit from the theory according to which spiritual plastic natures would form and animate the living in an autonomous fashion, Pierre Bayle had jumped into the fray as of August 1704, by developing a polemical exchange with Le Clerc (1704–1706). Leibniz found himself implicated by Bayle, the defender of occasionalism against all possible restoration of substantial forms. Furthermore, Le Clerc appealed to him to supply an opinion on the opposing theses and to clarify his own system. As a result, Leibniz decided to distance his theory of the organism from the revalorized doctrine of plastic natures: thus, in 1705, he published “Considérations sur les principes de vie et sur les natures plastiques” in Histoire des ouvrages des savants, edited by Basnage de Beauval.
- 18.
See Hartsoeker’s letter to Le Clerc in Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, VIII (1717), 303–350.
- 19.
Quoted in Roger (1971, 434). The Recueil was republished in the Cours de physique (Hartsoeker 1730).
- 20.
“[…] the crawfish, which has many parts that renew themselves from time to time, via a development very much akin to that of plants (Mr Vallisneri, one of the most precise and skilful observers of nature, is of a similar mind regarding crawfish, which he took the trouble to inform me in a letter of the month of December 1723)” (Bourguet 1729, 148).
- 21.
Note, in this passage, the metaphorical use of the notion of “infinitesimal,” inspired by Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus.
- 22.
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Duchesneau, F. (2010). Louis Bourguet and the Model of Organic Bodies. In: Fraenkel, C., Perinetti, D., Smith, J. (eds) The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9385-1_6
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