The Age of Linnaeus

Sten Lindroth was a Swedish professor whose magnum opus was the unfinished four-volume work "Svensk Lärdomshistoria". It deals with Swedish intellectual history and science from the Middle Ages to the late 18th century. The three first volumes are complete, while the concluding fourth volume is much slimmer and was edited by an associate after Lindroth's death. Originally, this mastodont project was also supposed to have covered the 19th century. 

I recently skimmed the third volume, "Frihetstiden" (published in 1975). The Age of Freedom is the period from 1719 to 1772, that is from the death of the warrior-king Karl XII to the self-coup of Gustav III. During this period, Sweden lost its status as a great power in northern Europe. In return, the country got a parliamentary form of government. The intellectual life continued to be just as dynamic as during the Great Power period. As usual, Lindroth is very comprehensive and includes pretty much everyone in his overview, not just the "respectable" people or the "real" scientists.

Thus, Swedenborg in his capacity as spirit-seer is featured. His scientific endavors were dealt with already in volume two. There is a chapter on Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, who was both a chemist, prominent mineralogist, idiosyncratic hydrologist and alchemist. He was nicknamed "our Hermes Trismegistos". At one point, Wallerius claimed that Moses was the greatest among mineralogists and chemists! There was also Gustaf Bonde, a politician who wrote a heavily mythologized history of Sweden while immersing himself in the studies of alchemy, kabbala and Hermetism.

I admit that I like Lindroth's objective approach even to thinkers far removed from our present-day paradigms. However, there is one character from 18th century history of science towards which he is very negative. Ironically, that person is...Carolus Linnaeus!

I know next to nothing about the progress or otherwise of Linnean studies circa 1975, but my best guess is that Lindroth wrote at a time when the sheer genius and greatness of Linnaeus, often considered the greatest Swedish scientist who ever lived, had began to be questioned, hopefully in favor of a more realistic assesment. Or did the pendulum swing too much in the other direction? Lindroth describes "the father of biology" as a hysteric (today we would say bipolar) who read Agrippa, believed in numerology (5, 7 and 12 were especially important) and never made any scientific discoveries of a radical kind. Indeed, this deeply superstitious man and believer in Nemesis Divina had a cult-like following and may actually have impeded the advance of modern biology in Sweden. Lindroth even believes that one Petrus Artedi may have been just as important. 

The standard criticism of Carl von Linné, to use his Swedish name, is that he had a static, "creationist" view of nature. Genera and species are unchanging, created by God. For some weird reason, Linné believed that there could only be 5 776 genera! The rest of his system of classification (including the notorious "sexual system") was wholly artificial and frequently rather weird. Thus, Linnaeus classified the snail and its shell in two different classes! In general, he had a scholastic attitude and obssesively tried to order Nature even when no obvious order was to be found. 

Except sometimes. It seems that even this annoying character occasionally changed his mind. At some point, Linné realized that species could hybridize, but Lindroth believes that his explanation was crazy and based on sheer speculation rather than empirical evidence. It's also interesting to note that Linnaeus believed in the existence of wildmen, who could perhaps be seen as transitional forms between ape and man. Linné took a more dynamic approach to nature in his studies "Oeconomia naturae" and "Politia naturae", in which he discusses the fecundity of nature, food chains, ecological balance, and so on.

Not sure how to end this review, so I just end!