The Form of Man

This chapter examines how the science of man became the natural history of man, a history not of individuals or nations but of the human species. A new biological conception of species “as an entity distributed in time and space,” released from the synchronic grid of Linnaean taxonomy as well as from a providential cosmology, comprised what Philip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” That revolution would be as consequential for literary genres, especially the novel, as it was for the natural and human sciences, in part due to Buffon's recourse to a literary style and techniques of “speculative thought experiment,” probabilistic reasoning, “analogical reasoning, and divination” in his scientific method. The chapter then looks at the debate over the history of man that broke out in the mid-1780s between Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Herder. One of the great intellectual quarrels of the late Enlightenment, it signposted the forking paths of Kant's critical philosophy, on the one hand, and the scientific project of natural history on the other.