Conclusions

The diversity of its applications places in clear relief both the ease with which the systematic model could be brought to bear on different subject matters and its prestige and pervasiveness among late Enlightenment thinkers as a way of ordering knowledge or experience. The systematic model rode a wave of enthusiasm that carried it above and beyond its connections to any particular field of inquiry. Its successes may be readily catalogued. They are not so easily explained, although several conclusions may be ventured on the basis of the preceding analysis.

In several cases, the adoption of rationalized nomenclature or the systematic grouping of the objects of a field in hierarchical categories was the result of a direct modeling on systematic botany, and not simply the expression of a more fundamental impulse of which botany itself was one manifestation. As Foucault pointed out, botany enjoyed epistemological precedence in the classical age, if only because the externality of the significant characters of plants lent itself most easily to specification of degrees of identity and difference according to visible marks. The role of the botanical model is also suggested by the temporal priority of systematic botany, which had emerged full-fledged by the middle of the 18th century. Tentative efforts for parallel reforms in medicine, mineralogy, and chemistry are visible before consolidation of Linnæan botany, but it was only after this consolidation that substantial movement took place in other fields. The serious botanical interests evident in the early careers of such key figures as Sauvages in medicine and Haüy in mineralogy, and the involvement of Linnæus himself in the systematics of minerals and diseases, lend further support to the view that systematic botany served as a model for other fields.

Utilization of the model was not mechanical and uniform. Each field seized on those aspects that promised to meet its own most pressing requirements. For chemists it was above all the possibility of a rationalized and radically simplified nomenclature that appealed. For mineralogists and physicians it was the concept of species, the emphasis on exact description, and the promise of a comprehensive ordering of data that counted most. For all of these fields, and for others such as analytic geometry, mechanics, the theory of machines, physiology, anatomy, and materia medica, the rationalization made possible by the systematic model was in part motivated by, and often served the needs of teaching.

The place and importance of the systematic model in the late Enlightenment was enhanced by its resonance with other elements of the time. The kinship and—on occasion—the intersection of the model with mathematics as modalities of the geometrical spirit have been mentioned. Systematics and mathematics were also associated in the prevailing epistemology, best represented by Condillac. Condillac's name and ideas reappeared again and again in applications of the systematic model to fields as diverse as chemistry, mineralogy, nosology, and anatomy. Although his inspiration came from algebra, Condillac's stress on science as a well-made language helped to motivate and sanction attempts to construct rationalized systems of nomenclature. His emphasis on the epistemological priority of sensations validated the use of externally observable features as criteria of classification. And his notion of analysis underlined the importance of seeking the elementary constituents out of which any larger whole was constituted.

In their efforts to systematize and rationalize all knowledge within their chosen domains, proponents of the systematic model moved easily with the broader currents of the encyclopedic movement. As W.T. Stearn has noted, Linnæus was a born encyclopedist in the extent of his knowledge of particulars, in the clarity and concision of his expression, in his industry, perseverance, and talent for methodological organization, and in his attention to utility. Adanson not only contributed to the Encyclopédie , but conceived vast encyclopedic ambitions of his own. Systematic efforts in particular subject areas

were easily subsumed under the more comprehensive task of organizing all knowledge, as the articles on special fields within the Encyclopédie méthodique make plain.^[67]

By the time that Bichat published his books on physiology and anatomy around 1800, the model's prestige and influence were already beginning their decline. Bichat himself was moving away from his taxonomy of vital properties and toward a more strictly experimental approach to physiology. While they continued to do systematics, botanists and zoologists—the latter led by Cuvier—turned increasingly to more natural systems that embraced structural and functional aspects of the organism, and to anatomical and physiological studies in their own right. While classification and nomenclature of minerals continued to be active issues well into the 19th century, the center of interest in mineralogy shifted to chemical composition and physical properties. Inorganic chemists, with rational nomenclature firmly established, moved on to new problems: proximate and elementary analysis, atomic theory, electrochemistry, and so on. Nosology was displaced by pathological anatomy.

No doubt the model proved less appropriate and productive outside botany and zoology than within them. This is clear enough in retrospect, since evolutionary community of descent provides a natural basis for hierarchical grouping of plants and animals that does not exist for minerals, chemical compounds, or diseases. To some extent the model was eclipsed by its very success. At least this was the case in botany and chemistry, where the establishment of rationalized nomenclature and classification enabled botanists and inorganic chemists to carry out more effective studies of other problems in their fields. Where these foundations were not in place, the systematic model could find new life. The appearance of burgeoning numbers of new organic compounds from the 1820s provoked fresh preoccupation with problems of naming and grouping in chemistry. To these problems the model could and did respond, with substantial consequences for chemical theory.^[68]

That is not the whole story, however. The very extravagance with which the systematic model was embraced between 1750 and 1810 suggests that more was involved in its success than its appropriateness for particular sciences at a determinate stage of their development, and more involved in its demise than the evolution of those sciences to a higher stage. The resonances of the systematic model with applied mathematics as a modality of the geometrical spirit, with sensationalist epistemology, with the encyclopedic movement, and with the rationalizing endeavors of the absolutist state, suggest the coherence of systematics with general and characteristic features of the culture of the late 18th century.