"God created, Linnaeus organized."
"...his beloved, who for nearly four years had been waiting for her dear Ulysses." — from his own autobiography, on himself, in the third person
Domain: Eukarya
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Sub-order: Haplorhini
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Sub-genus: Homo (sapiens)
Species: Homo Sapiens
Name: Carl Linnaeus
Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. This famous line, taken as a division of labour, it is accurate enough. Linnaeus (1707-1778) discovered almost nothing about nature. His achievement was in filing it, and then write the statutes governing how everyone else would be permitted to file it thereafter. He was a LSI, with a slight accent on LII that supplied the scientific-wonder appetite the core would otherwise have lacked.
The decisive exhibit is not even the Systema Naturae, but another manuscript. Over many years Linnaeus privately assembled some two hundred case studies of divine retribution — a man did such a thing, and this is what subsequently became of him and of his children — and left them for the moral instruction of his wayward son. The Nemesis Divina was lost for a long time and has only recently been published entire. One overview notes: "The humanization of Swedish Law had commenced at the end of the seventeenth century. But it progressed slowly... But Linnæus' sense of justice reacted, as we have seen, against acts of ruthlessness, cruelty and violence. His sympathy with poverty, destitution and abandonment is movingly expressed in Nemesis Divina. His own administration of justice while Rector of Upsala University proves his humane views on law and justice... This tendency was not unfamiliar to a period when Frederick II of Prussia's sister was the Queen of Sweden, and Gustavus III was heir to the throne. Nemesis Divina displays, as we have seen, many signs of the gradual modification of the concept of retaliation." Other reviews are not so sanguine: a Goodreads review states: "von Linné sure had a hard on for God's sadistic vengeance." Everyone, however, agrees that the book shows that the moral world runs on law — and the method used to demonstrate it is the same as in his scientific works. Both in morality and in botany, he sought to preserve and organize, not to innovate or challenge the existing social or natural order. Collect the concrete instances, describe each one carefully, classify. His editor calls it an experimental theology, and notes that it is analogous to the natural-historical work in precisely this respect. He built the moral order a herbarium, because he could not leave it in the "anarchic", ungoverned condition. In general, types between LII and LSI are the ones for whom the "classificatiory" instinct, applied to reality, runs the highest.
Species, for Linnaeus, were fixed discrete kinds, created in the beginning, exactly as many as the Creator made and no more. It was structurally necessary. "We reckon the number of species as the number of different forms that were created in the beginning. . . . That new species can come to exist in vegetables is disproved by continued generations, propagation, daily observations, and the cotyledons...", he noted. A system built on hard edges cannot metabolise continuous variation — hybrids, sports, the monstrous Peloria toadflax that seemed to have walked across a boundary he had drawn. He worried at these for decades and never absorbed them. What Darwin, both a more Ne-ish and a less "static" character, eventually had to do, in order to move at all, was dissolve exactly the boundaries Linnaeus required in order to work. And having drawn the boundaries, he legislated them. Critica Botanica and Philosophia Botanica are codes, written in numbered aphorisms, laying down what a name may be, who may confer it, what may not be done. Binomial nomenclature — the reform that actually made him immortal — is a piece of administrative law, and it succeeded for the same reasons: two words instead of a descriptive paragraph, learnable, indexable, enforceable. He extended the same treatment to minerals, to diseases, and eventually to botanists, whom he sorted into ranks. A man who classifies his own colleagues is no longer able to tell where the filing ought to stop!
His obvious sense of wonder in nature (he is said to have liked flowers ever since he was a small child) is LII-ish, but his LSI traits are, overall, far stronger. He was, for the founder of field taxonomy, a strikingly poor field researcher; one modern assessment has his methodology swinging wildly between minutiae and the cursory. He was better with a dried specimen on a sheet than with a living population in front of him, because the sheet holds its shape, pointing to an increase of the weak "static" dichotomy. He composed his own laudatory notice for the Hamburgische Berichte, praising his own diligence and method, and let it run unsigned.
The strokes eventually took away his memory at a very advanced age, and it is said he enjoyed reading his books and commented on their quality, how great they were and how he wished he had written them. This anecdote may be a little too good to be true. However, there is one thing about it which is indeed true about the man: the work was always the constant thing about him. The things he could not classify – variation, weather, people’s opinions about him, length of a trip once over with – he simply denied, magnified, or repeated until it stayed put.
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