Biology Reference
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So far as the more specific subject matter of this topic is concerned,
this would also mean that coinciding efforts to win scientific patronage
during this and later periods would reflect the same pattern. To the extent
that the scientific ethos is always a kind of microcosmic reflection of the
social macrocosm, scientistic movements will always evolve in concert with
the societies they aspire to influence, and in the
Esquisse
we gain a glimpse
of this co-evolution. Condorcet's main subject was the revolutionary move-
ment from which he had been exiled, but as an author who had another
foot firmly planted in the world of science, the affairs of science were espe-
cially likely to be drawn into this picture. If a religious rationale was needed
to sustain the public authority of the new republic, it was needed to sustain
the scientific ethos as well. Such imitations were likely to occur, not merely
because the mimetic impulse is the foundational element of human creativ-
ity, but also because they were ideologically attractive. Science already had
sacred import, and so to ground it in anything less than eternal truth would
be to demote its significance. Once having been elevated as a full partner
with theology by the end of the seventeenth century, it seems unlikely that
the culture of science would willingly surrender the status it had come to
share with theology as a second “queen of the sciences.” To step back upon
any lower rung of the social order would be to sacrifice its public visibility,
presence, and sense of higher purpose, to turn science back into what it had
been before the modern era—a minor tributary running out of lesser water-
ways of the medieval intellect such as mathematics, logic, and medicine. In
this regard, mimesis of the kind chronicled in the last chapter is not particu-
larly surprising, even if it is often unnoticed. The spiritualization of science
persists because it builds upon the cultural success of a public identity that
the scientific culture first found in orthodoxy.
The religious trappings of the French Revolution depict this pattern
from the outside in, that is to say, by showing the complementary work of
religious invention that was occurring in the ideologies of the secular nation-
states in which science would henceforth need to implant its ethos. Just as
Bacon's religious narrative could have had little rhetorical efficacy without
linking science to the Protestant world that was then gaining ascendancy,
Condorcet's naturalized one would have had no comparable significance
as a resource for scientific patronage unless analogous religious sentiments
were arising within France's new secular order. The scientistic potential of a
text like the
Esquisse
could only be realized if something like the transforma-
tion of the Christian narrative was also going on in French society and in
Europe more broadly. And this certainly was the case. For the civilization
