Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
destined, with the help of a beneficiary priestly culture set apart by its scien-
tific discipline, for the promised land of positive knowledge. Science's media-
tion is necessary because “the picture of the progress of the human mind”
can only be realized if one “confines oneself to the study and observation of
the general facts and laws about the development of these faculties” as they
manifest in the individual human subject.
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Without science to speak the
language of nature, the world cannot realize this universal destiny.
The “symbol of this universalism,” Collingwood tells us, “is the adop-
tion of a single chronological framework for all historical events,” and in
displaced representations, this manifests when the hero's actions are sym-
bolically related to the whole of history.
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In the science fiction examples
that I introduced in chapter 1, this is achieved through those plot features
that tip viewers off to the fact that the struggles of Gwyllm Griffiths and
Dave Bowman represent the human struggle writ large. In the first case, we
learn this when we are told that the genetic manipulation that Griffiths has
subjected himself to recapitulates the process of biological evolution that
has brought humanity into its present state of being. In Bowman's case,
this is symbolized by the fact that his quest replays the primordial drama of
evolution that opened the film.
Condorcet's historical drama relies upon similar devices. His effort to
make the operations of science and nature one and the same ensures that
the individual scientific acts he recounts will have a microcosmic signifi-
cance similar to the import that the acts of Griffith and Bowman had in
their own narratives. More specifically, since the
Esquisse
depicts a historical
quest spanning all human generations, its prescientific heroes enact uni-
versal meaning by being situated within recursive cycles that anticipate the
arrival of modern science. This is more in line with how Christian universal-
ism integrates the various epochs making up its history. It is by representing
Old Testament characters as prophetic types who find their fulfillment in
Christ that the continuity of Christian universalism is upheld. The various
actions of Old Testament characters like Moses, Elijah, Jonah, and Joshua
that are replayed in Christ's life enable the Christian reader to tie the two
Testaments together into a single narrative that stretches from the first act
of creation to God's final redemption.
The universalism at work in Condorcet's doctrine of unending progress
demands something similar, and the heroes found in each of his historical
stages prefigure in some way the apocalypse of seventeenth-century science.
The more that past heroes of learning can be shown to be types for scientific
figures like Galileo and Descartes, the more that the historical progress now
