ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from an argument which the author developed in a recent article relating to pre-Darwinian science and historiography specifically in France. The article argued that in France there are stronger parallels with a Darwinian conception of ‘becoming’ to be found in the historiography of the period than in its natural science. Lamarck’s temporalisation of the domain of living things gave rise, we might say, to an essentially scientistic rather than a properly historical conception of organic becoming for the animal world. Darwin’s model, by contrast, did just the reverse. The limited Darwinian approach was unlikely to be adopted by a French naturalist because there was no compelling moral need, nor any methodological precedent for such a tactic. The scientist was not put under moral pressure to avoid the issues of origin and direction; if anything, he found himself under methodological pressure not to go this way.
