ABSTRACT
In the 16th and 17th centuries, nature was thought to be divided into three kingdoms: mineral, animal, and vegetable. As late as 1710, John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum described natural history with a varied catalogue of the products of nature: “Natural history is a description of each of the natural products of the earth, water, or air, such as beasts, birds, fish, metals, minerals, and fossils, together with the phenomena that sometimes appear in the material world, such as meteors.” 1 We can easily find, by Charles Bonnet, 2 Bourguet, Robinet, and others, texts in which the intermediate beings between the kingdoms—coral, mushroom, polyp—are described with relish. Leibniz’s principle of continuity was the rigorous metaphysical formulation of the cultural motif of the Great Chain of Being, famously studied by Lovejoy’s 1936 book bearing this title. If we now consult Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (1809), we encounter a radical opposition between the organic and the inorganic. As Félix Vicq d’Azyr put it at the same time: “There are therefore only two kingdoms in nature, one of which enjoys and the other is deprived of life.” 3 In other words, in the 18th century, the living world came together under the heading of the organic, which featured a massive opposition to stones, mountains, “brute bodies,” or “brute matter” as they would later be called. Kant wrote the third Critique against the backdrop of this opposition.
