Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
this to God's superintendence of history. But Frye's theory of displacement
would ask us to consider whether there lies beneath even such marked dif-
ferences some continuity of form. It asks us to do this by searching for figu-
rative language (simile, metaphor, analogy) that points back to a religious
prototype, and once looked at in this fashion, Condorcet's history begins to
take on a quite different appearance.
One subtlety in the previous passage that suggests an analogy to this
more traditional form is Condorcet's use of a now-familiar convention of
scientific writing, the passive voice. We might think of this as a stylistic
accentuation of the objectivity that inductivist and experimentalist episte-
mologies attribute to science, but passive constructions also accord with
a particular narrative structure. By writing human agency out of what
it describes, the scientific passive also invites readers to assign agency to
nature. Syntactically the passive puts the scientist in a receptive pose, as
a kind of listener who is acted upon by nature, and by doing so it always
implies that nature is the real actor in the drama of scientific advancement.
Thus when Condorcet depicts human beings less as actors than as creatures
being acted upon, he is also setting up the plot of a historical narrative
which makes nature analogous to God and the role of science analogous to
that of God's elect. This pivotal displacement becomes more manifest at the
close of this opening passage. The evolving complex of mental associations
that we receive at birth find their culmination in the harmony of societal
bonds, those “ties of interest and duty” to which
nature herself has wished
to attach the most precious portion of our happi-
ness and the most painful of our ills.
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It would be easy to wave off this momentary personification of nature
as a mere poetic embellishment, but the theistic analogy it invokes is also
consistent with the entire narrative of the
Esquisse
. If we are “born with”
science, then science represents what the human psyche does once it is fully
in touch with its native operations, and science is likewise the obedient
servant of nature that is working to expedite her “wish” for our happiness.
In this regard, Condorcet's passive construction of the scientific condition
is the exact corollary to Bacon's notion that the work of science is obedience
to providence.
As Condorcet goes on to discuss the “aim of the work,” he contin-
ues to sustain a narrative form that is analogous to Bacon's. His language
denotes a larger context of purpose and virtuous inevitability within which
