This is the eighth post in the NiCHE series Animal Encounters, edited by Heather Green and Caroline Abbott. You can read all posts in this series here.
When I was researching for my Master’s thesis, I was trying to situate myself between ideas of nature and their representations in early modern material culture. Upon looking into the writings of the Hartlib society, I came across the works of Kenelm Digby. A catholic royalist, natural philosopher, inventor, and polymath, Digby wrote extensively about how he believed the universe operated. Upon reading what is considered his magnum opus, Two Treatises: In the one of which, The Nature of Bodies; In the other, The Nature of Mans Soule; is Looked Into: In Way of Discover of The Immortality of Reasonable Soules (Paris, 1644), I was taken by how Digby positioned the natural world and the rationale he ascribed to everything in it.
Two Treatises begun as one of the first texts to work off the Discourse de la Method by Rene Descartes and Digby finds himself departing from Descartes in this text and throughout his life’s work through his idea of an interconnected cosmos. And, in his focus on interconnections came to intriguing conclusions about both animals and nature. While not a writer of animal or plants’ exact histories in his moment, Digby’s works become an attempt at documenting the lives of plants and animals in hopes of understanding the larger idea of nature’s cycles through life and death and beyond. An exemplary early modern writer, Digby was guided by hopes to differentiate humans from nature and to prove that their difference pointed to a difference gifted down from God that promised everlasting life; yet, his application of these ideas instead touch on processes of regeneration and ecological recycling that would not be fleshed out for some time after his death. The caterpillar from the stick and the tadpole from the mud are two examples of these processes he theorizes.
In 1644, Digby, recalled a story from a colleague who had “once observed in Spain, in the Spring season, how a stick, lying in a moist place, grew, in tract of time.” Digby’s colleague watched as “every day the body grew longer and longer, and more legs appear’d,” marveled at the growth of its “unpolished head,” and as “little legs began to discover themselves,” observing daily as the creature “grew more and more distinctly shaped.” “At length,” Digby conveys, “when he saw the Animal almost finish’d, and near separating it self from the rest of the stick; he stay’d then by it, and saw it creep away in a Caterpillar, leaving the stick and dirt.”1
Digby uses this story as a tool for his description of nature as a system marked by, “reiterated revolutions, makes in time every thing of every thing.” He continues by making an analogy between the caterpillar to tadpoles and frogs, describing how nature transforms things:
As when of mud she [nature] makes Tadpoles, and Frogs of them, and afterwards mud again of the Frog: or when she runs a like progress, from Earth to Worms, and from them to Flies, and the like; so changing one Animal into such another, as, in the next precedent step, the matter in those circumstances is capable of being changed into; or rather (to say better) must necessarily be changed into.2
What came next for the caterpillar was unmentioned. However, like the tadpoles and the frogs, Digby made it clear that the reader was to expect another change in the works for this animal. Life, death, decay, and new life from that decay makes up a foundational knowledge of our world. The reiterated revolutions that makes “in time every thing of every thing”, paints a larger landscape of the natural cycle that is familiar to us. Digby describes the interconnectedness of life — from death and decomposition and rebirth, in this writing to show a natural world that works perfectly as it is. These stories are not only a documentation of aspects of what we recognize as the cycle of life more broadly, they are also in this light a representation of the presence of animal life in the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century.
Digby’s interconnected nature historiographically challenges many assumptions of a universal acceptance of nature being “man’s dominion” to use and destroy for capital. Insects roles at this ideological moment are marked often as below study. Decades before Digby wrote Two Treatises in which the caterpillar appears, Lodowick Bryskett in his A discourse of civil life (1606) wrote how insects were among examples of “the most imperfect among living creatures.”3 This is quite different than Digby’s interpretation of insect sentience. Indeed, creatures, or “beasts”, are described by Digby as having both a “more determinate nature” than humans, and also as being capable of “becometh judge of what is good, and what is bad for him.”4 The creatures presented in Digby’s work, be they caterpillar, frog, or fly, are argued to carry within them a necessity of change: the caterpillar emerges from the stick to turn into a moth or a butterfly because that is what is best for it; once it has died it will transform into something else, and contribute to new life through its consumption or decomposition. Their determinate nature of change, (what we call metamorphosis), is given by Digby a rationale of being an understanding within the animal to do what is best for them and for nature more broadly.
“Nature” is still posited as that which operates through ordered changes. As Lorraine Daston notes in Against Nature, “[nature] is a repository of all imaginable orders.”5 Digby, too, presented nature as orderly, bestowing it the status of oeconomical, a term typically applied then to governors. Under his term “the oeconomy of nature,”6 Digby outlines nature as inherently oeconomical—that is, describing nature as being embedded with an understanding of everything having its best place and use without waste.
When applied to nature, Digby’s understanding of use and waste positioned human interference and alterations in the course of natural systems as the antithesis of the revolutions, changes, and growths inherent to nature, instead looking to utilize these systems as they are.7 His work uniquely centers environmental limits, instead demonstrating that the way nature itself works to aid animals, “things,” and humans alike reach what is best for them. In his quest to define the limits of these cycles, Digby’s conceptions of nature instead shows an understanding of use that does not fit a model of infinite growth, of Capital as king.
Though Digby’s arguments are of course antiquated, the presence of the animal in these passages exemplifies — at minimum — attempts at representing animals’ experiences of the world, and the way human philosophy has relied on studying these experiences to explain our own. What I believe Digby’s writings articulate best is the fundamental necessity of considering the interconnectedness of nature and the potential inherent benefits for all beyond just that for humans. As Erica Fudge argues in her Brutal Reasoning (2006), “it is by acknowledging that human beings are inextricably linked to non-humans– animals, objects, machines, ‘things’– that a new way of looking at the world, and the possibility of a new future, emerges.”8 How can we posit a new future, (or even a better present), without understanding this connection?
Fudge argues that we must take discussions of animals in the early modern period seriously, and further that by “ignoring animals we not only misrepresent ourselves and our pasts but limit our possible futures as well.”9 Digby conceives of nature and its creatures as interconnected: forming community amongst themselves, operating not for humanity but for themselves. In tune with Fudge’s project and new histories of animals, the positioning of the caterpillar and the frog and how they “maketh their way by such steppes into the world,” alludes to a history of these animals in and of themselves.10 One wonders, then, where the caterpillar’s story went from its interaction with Digby’s colleague in the early seventeenth century.
Though we are linked, that which is “natural”— and the workings Digby, Bryskett, Fudge, and others have problematised — have both predated us and will outlive us. Indeed, butterflies and moths predate the existence of human beings by a significant measure of planetary time, they have a history that is beyond us. Thus, a history positioning a history of animals and nature as beings with workings for themselves, who do not simply exist to serve human systems, must be found and preserved. While we may be bound to the context of their histories from humans perspectives, if we are going to seek a future of sustainable interrelationships, and of respectful engagements with the environmental limits of our world, we must start with a lineage of thinking of these creatures as both interconnected to us and our environment, and how human interference can make these infinite cycles of nature detrimentally finite.
Notes
[1] Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises: In the one of which, The Nature of Bodies; In the other, The Nature of Mans Soule; is Looked Into: In Way of Discover of The Immortality of Reasonable Soules (Paris, 1644).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (London: 1606), 190. Early English Books Online. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A17081.0001.001
[4] Digby, Two Treatises, 294.
[5] Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 60.
[6] Digby, Two Treatises, 38.
[7] Kenelm Digby, A discourse concerning the vegetation of plants spoken by Sir Kenelme Digby at Greshan
College on the 23 of January, 1660: at a meeting for promoting the philosophical knowledge by experiments (London, 1661), 30-1; 47-8. Early English Books Online.
[8] Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 189.
[9] Ibid., 192.
[10] Digby, Two Treatises, 220.
Featured Image: “A Caterpillar” by Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne is marked with CC0 1.0.
Devyn Gwynne