ABSTRACT
The foundations of our system of classification, then, are not universal 'Forms or Molds, wherein all natural Things, that exist, are cast, and do equally partake', but the objective resemblances between things, the contingent fact that 'Nature in the Production of Things, makes several of them alike'.99 This fact Locke regarded as undeniable and 'obvious' at the level of observation, and he accepted too (perhaps too readily) that phenomenal resemblances are an indication of underlying structural resemblances.100 It is important to realize, as critics have often failed to realize, that Locke's recognition of natural resemblances is not a concession of any kind in the argument against natural species, against natural boundaries independent of our concepts. It is true that it is on the basis of these observed resemblances that we form abstract ideas 'and set them up in the mind, with Names annexed to them, as Patterns, or Forms, (for in that sense the word Form has a very proper signification)'. But the system of 'species' thus conceived is a necessarily inadequate system imposed by us on natural anarchy or continuity. Complex machines may differ from one another in indefinitely many ways, and by indefinitely small amounts or degrees. However we divide the biological or chemical worlds, there will be living creatures and stuffs with attributes that cut across the classes we have formed. Thus Locke can find the notion of a great chain of being, which was tradition-
ally conceived of as a hierarchical order of distinct species, itself consonant with the anarchic mechanist vision:
There are Animals so near of kin both to Birds and Beasts, that they are in the middle between both. . . . There are some Brutes, that seem to have as much Knowledge and Reason, as some that are called Men . . . and so on till we come to the lowest and the most inorganical parts of Matter, we shall find everywhere, that the several Species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees.101
