[In the following excerpt, Bush considers the effect of Darwin's poetical interpretation of the ideas contained in Linnaeus' Sexual System on the pioneering botanical engravings in Dr. Robert John Thornton's New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus (1797-1807).]

Between the years 1797 and 1807 Dr. Robert John Thornton produced his masterwork, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus—a publication of enormous size devoted to celebrating the science of botany through hand-colored engraved plates and poetry. The poetry by such happily forgotten poets as Miss Seward, “the Swan of Lichfield,” and Henry James Pye, poet laureate from 1790 to 1813, has passed out of memory. The plates, however, are one of those outstanding and unique achievements of art, well known to enthusiasts of botanical illustration, but still generally ignored as one of the most significant cultural artifacts of the 1790s and early 1800s.¹ The finest recent comment on Thornton occurs in one of Jonathan Williams' poems. Like Ezra Pound before him, this American poet reminds us of aspects of our own culture which we have neglected:

I remember the night-blooming
Cereus, by Dr Thornton, Engraver, Blake's
Patron, it
                                        hangs in the hall outside the bedroom
swaying hungrily like these
giant white goddesses of the dark grotto.(2)

In his own time Thornton had the misfortune to become almost instantly out of fashion. The kind of poetry he admired and the principles of civilization and knowledge which lay behind it were being strongly challenged by more innovative and imaginative poets. The Lyrical Ballads had appeared the year after Thornton started on his masterpiece and a serious attack on him as a type of intellectual came later from Blake who was, in part, revenging himself for a remark about his contributions to Thornton's compilation, The Pastorals of Virgil (1821), which ran as follows:

The Illustrations of this English Pastoral are by the famous Blake, the illustrator of Young's Night Thoughts, and Blair's Grave; who designed and engraved them himself. This is mentioned, as they display less of art than genius, and much admired by some eminent painters.³

Blake used the occasion of Thornton's printing of his “new Translation of the Lord's Prayer” to attack the clumsiness of its language with its bias towards natural religion, allegory, and faith based upon “scientific” proof.⁴ He had attacked the same cast of mind in Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Joshua Reynolds. In these thinkers Blake saw a simplistic rational vision becoming an excuse for impoverishing imaginative complexity in history, religion, and art.

And yet Thornton's achievement remains. In a sense his masterpiece succeeds for all the wrong reasons. For I suggest that paradoxically the very things Blake hated, the allegorizing mentality, the use of the classics as revealed truth, the rational view of history and nature, and the involvement with a simplistic scientific methodology are responsible for its success. Thornton's pictures push to extremes these modes of thought and in so doing create an artistic synthesis which moves far beyond the sum of its parts.

First, however, the terms of Thornton's cultural inheritance must be examined not to place Thornton in some niche of intellectual history but to see whether some of its paradoxes and contradictions give any clue to the complexity and strange appeal of the pictures.

Critics have pointed out that the most obvious debt is to Erasmus Darwin. And that debt is both poetic and scientific. To understand Thornton's interests one must go back to Darwin's best-known if not his best poem, The Botanic Garden, which appeared in two parts in the reverse order: The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1791).

The poem came at the end of a long tradition of eighteenth-century “Miltonic” poetry. These poems, seeking to emulate Paradise Lost, attempted to create poetic and dramatic frameworks within which all aspects of knowledge (religious, scientific, mythic, moral, social, and political) might achieve some kind of synthesis.

In The Economy of Vegetation, the Goddess of Botany presides over every area of human activity (the events of civil and natural history, invention, discovery, physics, chemistry, classical legend) and each canto of the poem is devoted to one of the four elements of matter itself: fire, earth, water, and air. The problem is why botany should be the presiding deity and the center of every area of human activity. The answer goes at least half way to explaining the iconography of Thornton's interests and the comprehensive cultural appeal of the pictures.

The chief reason lay in the scientific prestige of Linnaeus, and the universal acceptance among botanists of his classificatory system based on the differentiation of the reproductive parts of the plants. But the influence went far beyond botany. For like Newton in physics Linnaeus had discovered the laws of botany which defined the reality of the botanical world, and by analogy the laws of society.

His prestige was also a reflection of a general response to the metaphysic of the classificatory impulse. Recent articles on Linnaeus have shown that behind his own drive to monistic explanation was a conviction which went back to the earliest part of his career that “the elements of order consisted of the fixed, discrete, ‘natural’ kinds created by God.”⁵ But such a metaphysic of reality left out everything that was not perceivable by the most simplistic sense of vision. This split is reflected in the work of Linnaeus and it helped to create ambiguity in the work of both Darwin and Thornton. Linnaeus insisted, for example, on Latin names to distinguish the classes of plants and ruthlessly expunged local and folk names. On the other hand, he himself wrote fulsome botanical poetry typical of the thousands of rhyming botanical poetasters of the time. Poetry and science occupied strictly separate categories of response.

What distinguished these categories was not simply truth and fantasy, reason and imagination, fact and fiction, to use the terms current then as now. Rather it was a conflicting theory of vision. Bacon had pointed out that sight could distinguish individual objects in space without confusion and unlike the other senses was therefore most reliable for scientific enterprise.⁶ Even the visual elements of Linnaeus' classificatory system were limited, however. It was not a simple case of the sense of vision overruling the other senses but rather a question of what could be visually perceived and then arithmetically quantified taking precedence over nonarithmetically quantifiable aspects of sight. One may count the ratio of male to female parts of plants but not other visual impressions of plants such as color, shape, and form.

Both Darwin and Thornton instinctively reacted against this classificatory sense of visual quantification. But they were both scientists and had to make some sort of compromise. Erasmus Darwin's translation of Linnaeus' Families of Plants (made in 1787 under the auspices of the Lichfield Botanical Society) brings out not only the complex issues of this sense of visual quantification but also a sense of what that vision left out and how Darwin himself attempted to supply what was missing. In Linnaeus' sexual system of classification, the classes of plants were determined by the number of male parts and the orders by the number of female parts. In a summarizing key to the sexual system Darwin set out the last three classes in the following manner and they are typical of his descriptive process:

xxii. two houses.
                              Husbands and wives have different houses.
                              Male flowers and female flowers are on
          different plants.
xxiii. polygamies.
                              Husbands live with wives and concubines.
                              Hermaphrodite flowers, and male ones, or
          female ones in the same species.
xxiv. clandestine marriages.
                              Nuptials are celebrated privately.
                              Flowers concealed within the fruit, or in some
          irregular manner.(7)

The two descriptive sentences reflect a double vision which Darwin's poetical work exploits to the full. The first is poetic in the sense that it is a strictly nonvisual description and replete with nonscientific analogy. The second is scientific in the sense that the descriptive process is visual. Instead of attempting wholeness of response by delineating color, shape, smell, distribution, Darwin generalizes the one-dimensional scientific vision into a law of human nature.

For Darwin the problem was a linguistic one. It was no accident that Bacon popularized the call for a simple and logical type of style and rejected multiple levels of interpretation of words in favor of single meanings and definition. Darwin follows Bacon but only in the footnotes of his poems which are as important as the poetry which occupies the top of the page. In Loves of the Plants, in a typical prose interlude, the poet explains, “Science is best delivered in Prose, as its mode of reasoning is from stricter analogies than metaphors or similies [sic].”⁸ Whereas Linnaeus kept his poetic and scientific interests strictly separate, Darwin tried to reintegrate them if by no other means than juxtaposition on a single printed page.

Darwin attempted throughout his life to unify those diverse aspects of knowledge which the Scientific Revolution had irrevocably divided. The function of analogy in Darwin's methodology is to attempt to provide a single level of discourse through comparison. The difference between Linnaeus and Darwin is that whereas Darwin used the same classificatory system to prove philosophical monism throughout the whole order of nature, Linnaeus worked out a classificatory law in order to differentiate particular phenomena. Darwin's misuse of comparison led him into what Charles Olson called “symbology,”⁹ that is, the perception of similarity through a semantic trickery which blurs distinctions. Thornton, on the other hand, working in a visual medium, was able to avoid the pitfalls of the schisms between poetry and science by making a synthesis of their attributes which went far beyond the sum of the parts.

Darwin's analogies have two distinct divisions. First there is his concept of historical analogy in which the unifying principle is the notion of time as progressive, uniform, and continuous. These analogies are always described as “scientific.” The second mode of analogy is achieved by nonvisual association as in a dream. It is spaceless and timeless and always described as poetic. The first is something belonging to reality and sanity and is serious. The second belongs to fantasy and madness and is humorous and trivial. That is what Darwin means when he states that science argues by stricter analogies than poetry.

The paradox of analogy created by a progressive time sense is that it is finally nonprogressive. In Darwin's scheme the progression depends upon an ideal of science as a timeless, inviolable body of knowledge with different manifestations in each age. The essentially platonic nature of Darwin's thought ensures that reality is separable from its form. Only the particular manifestation changes in the stream of time. The concept of time depends on the concept of eternity and change is hence conceived as local movement within an eternally fixed framework:

The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry, before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which, after the discovery of the alphabet, were described and animated by the poets, and became the first deities of Egypt and afterwards of Greece and Rome.¹⁰

Darwin's view of time is not, as one scholar has suggested,¹¹ founded on the paradox of linear and circular notions of time. The two are not contradictory. The concept of progress in time for Darwin involved the idea of systematic evolution, and evolutionary theory states that there is a continuous and progressive relation between things distant in time. In the introduction to Families of Plants, Darwin expressed the wish that Linnaeus' work on animals could be completed and thus “complete the chain of the History of organized Nature,” and he continued:

For vegetables are, in truth, an inferior order of Animals, connected to the lower tribes of Insects, by many marine productions, whose faculties of motion and sensation are scarcely superior to those of the petals of many flowers. … The winged insects, as Bees, and Butterflies, are connected to the Birds, by the Humming-bird; which feeds on honey, and collects it with a kind of Probiscus, as it hangs on its vibrating wings. Birds are connected to Quadrupeds, by the bat and Vampire. These are allied to Fish, by Seals and Crocodiles; and by the Monkey-kind to Man.¹²

Another side of the paradox is the assumed split (which is none the less analogous) between history and nature. History progresses and its evolution is linear. Nature's evolution is simultaneously present in all its stages. So the foisting onto nature of a linear time sense linked the idea of progress with that of classification. For the nature of species is determined by the stage they have reached in time.

The image of the even flow of time creates both category and hierarchy and an essentially stable world picture. Analogy becomes possible at any point in the process because all points in time are similar. The progress of knowledge must under this system be an affirmation of a stable and continuous time sense. So, according to Darwin, the Egyptians discovered what the Greeks knew in a different form just as Ovid's Metamorphoses anticipates scientific discovery in botany. The paradox is again obvious. The metaphysic of a stable and continuous sense of time is essentially ahistorical. Although there is no space to consider it here, Darwin's view of evolutionary stasis is strongly connected with the ritualistic dramatic framework of his poems. Rituals are self-confirming, repeatable structures in which analogically human activity is confirmed by some view of the natural world. Whitehead has linked the process of scientific discovery with Greek tragedy, but long before him Erasmus Darwin was aware that the process of scientific discovery had its own metaphysic with its own hierarchy and ritual.¹³

The second method of analogy is transference without the need for “scientific proof.” This is a kind of analogy which is not justified by progress, law, reason, and visual proof. Since science owned the sense of vision, this analogy-making process was relegated to dream and poetry. In Loves of the Plants Darwin examines the whole of the botanical world, letting the poetry provide vicarious sexual analogy through botanical metaphor while the prose gives the substance of truth. Darwin's method of reversing Ovid's process of changing men into animals and plants enables him to talk wittily about every combination of the sexual act from monogamy to group sex. The following passage about the gloriosa lily is fairly typical:

When the young Hours amid her tangled hair
Wove the fresh rose-bud, and the lily fair,
Proud Gloriosa led three chosen swains,
The blushing captive of her virgin chains—
—When Time's rude hand a bark of wrinkles spread
Round her weak limbs, and silver'd o'er her head,
Three other youths her riper years engage,
The flatter'd victims of her wily age.

Gloriosa, 1, 119. Superba. Six males, one female. The petals of this beautiful flower with three of the stamens, which are first mature, hang down in apparent disorder; and the pistil bends at nearly a right angle, to insert its stigma amongst them. In a few days, as these decline, the other three stamens bend over, and approach the pistil.¹⁴

The transference of aspects of plant sexuality to human sexual activity here is meant to affect a risqué tone while providing enough interest for botanizing young women to enable them to memorize the somewhat abstract categories of botanical classification. But the idea that both prose and poetry in this way indicate the same phenomenon owes its validity to a platonic theory of language which believes that by changing the metaphor you may yet indicate the same phenomenon. Such a process denies all descriptive validity to words. Darwin even suggests that plant sexual analogy might accurately describe human sexual activity though away in some more exotic portion of the earth. The final footnotes gives an anthropological gloss to the last couplet:

A hundred virgins join a hundred swains,
And fond Adonis leads the sprightly trains;

as Darwin explains: “The society called the Areoi, in the island of Otaheite, consists of about 100 males and 100 females, who form one promiscuous marriage.¹⁵

Behind these attempts to unite the mutually exclusive areas of scientific vision with that of poetry and dream lies the large question of the mechanics of eighteenth-century psychophilosophical theories of vision. The prose interludes in Loves of the Plants, for example, not only indicate Darwin's nervousness about his method but they also attempt to justify poetry and painting by scientific and philosophic explanation. In the Proem to the work Darwin likens the function of poetry to the operations of a camera obscura:

Lo, here a camera obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvass, and magnified into apparent life!—if thou art perfectly at leasure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my inchanted garden.¹⁶

It was a convenient image for many reasons, not least that it could demonstrate the whole process of perceptual psychology. The white sheet was the passive tabula rasa of the Lockean mind, the aperture indicated the eye which received sensations from outside. In this poem it is, however, an image of a dream world, untouched by reality. It is used paradoxically here simply because an instrument used for defining the laws of light and perspective becomes a metaphor of a dream world.

Throughout his career Darwin is clearly fascinated by the connections between dream, the sense of vision, the mode of scientific reality, poetry, and painting. Quite how precarious simplistic psychological theories were for Darwin is revealed in a discussion of dream which occurs in the first prose interlude:

P.[oet] Thus we are deprived in sleep of the only two means by which we can distinguish the trains of ideas passing in our imaginations, from those excited by our sensations; and are led by their vivacity to believe them to belong to the latter. For the vivacity of these trains of ideas, passing in the imagination, is greatly increased by the causes above-mentioned; that is, by their not being disturbed or dissevered either by the appulses of external bodies, as in surprize; or by our voluntary exertions in comparing them with our previous knowledge of things, as in reasoning upon them.

B.[ookseller] Now to apply.

P. When by the art of the Painter or Poet, a train of ideas is suggested to our imaginations, which interests us so much by the irritations of common external objects, and cease also to use any voluntary efforts to compare these interesting trains of ideas with our previous knowledge of things, a compleat reverie is produced: during which time however short, if it be but for a moment, the objects themselves appear to exist before us. This I think has been called by an ingenious critic, “the ideal presence,” of such objects.¹⁷

Here is exhibited Darwin's fascination with a series of human experiences he groups under the general term reverie. To call the experience of dream “ideal presences” is an attempt to make safe something which to Darwin's mind is highly disturbing. It is interesting that the term vivacity is repeated to give an impression of the powerful nature of the dream experience and that the completion of reverie is achieved when “our previous knowledge of things” becomes irrelevant. Given the nature of scientific reality as described by the mechanisms of stable visual experience, dream threatens the structure at every point. It denies tradition and ritual (the nature of scientific proof is what may be repeatable with the same result each time) and involves strength and passion of feeling. This rationale of art does not appeal to experience but to a moral and hierarchical judgment based upon a fear of deception. So art then must be either ideal or misleading. In fact a third analogy-making process may be seen in Darwin's own variation on the theme of the sister arts in which he proves the similarity between poetry and painting by referring them both to their similar function of ideality and deception:

P.[oet] It has been already observed, that the principal part of the language of poetry consists of those words, which are expressive of the ideas, which we originally receive by the organ of sight; and in this it nearly indeed resembles painting; which can express itself in no other way, but by exciting the ideas or sensations belonging to the sense of vision.¹⁸

Although this serves to connect painting and poetry it in no way solves the problem of vision. He continues in a more interesting way.

But besides this essential similitude in the language of the poetic pen and pencil, these two sisters resemble each other, if I may so say, in many of their habits and manners. The painter to produce a strong effect, makes a few parts of his picture large, distinct, and luminous, and keeps the remainder in shadow, or even beneath its natural size and colour, to give eminence to the principle figure. This is similar to the common manner of poetic composition, where the subordinate characters are kept down, to elevate and give consequence to the hero or heroine of the piece.¹⁹

We have already seen how the visual reality of the scientific mode creates a sense of category and hierarchy. In painting this comes out as perspective (keeping things in proportionate sizes from a fixed point of view) and chiaroscuro (hierarchical distribution of light). This highly artificial mode of vision Darwin attempted to see as both scientific and artistic reality.

But still Darwin could not decide whether such a mode was ideal, that is, permanent and stable in nature, or deceptive, a figment of the imagination. After all the same image of the camera obscura might be used equally for both. Darwin's drive towards singleness of explanation made him confuse two essentially dissimilar aspects of vision and reverie. The first might be called some kind of fantasy of withdrawal, the other needed some concept of the creative imagination such as was being promulgated by Coleridge or Kant. The resultant confusion inevitably made him associate imagination with disease and imagination in this sense was whatever could not be circumscribed by a mechanistic view of vision. A brief glance at Darwin's medical works shows how this theory is given the authority of scientific explanation. In Zoonomia; or the laws of Organic Life (London, 1794), under Section XIV, of reverie, an explanation of reverie is given in scientific terms:

10 The following is the definition or character of complete reverie.

1. The irritative motions occasioned by the internal stimuli continue, those from the stimuli of external objects are either not produced at all, or are never succeeded by sensation or attention, unless they are at the same time excited by volition. 2. The sensitive motions continue, and are kept consistent by the power of volition. 3. The voluntary motions continue undisturbed. 4. The associate motions continue undisturbed.

Two other cases of reverie are related in Section XXXIV. 3. which further evince, that reverie is an effort of the mind to relieve some painful sensation, and is hence allied to convulsion, and to insanity.²⁰ The whole of the second volume is taken up with diseases of each stage of the psychological process. There are diseases of irritation, sensation, volition, and association. At any point the machine might break down.

As we have seen, the model for this essentially invisible human and psychological process was the camera obscura. In Darwin's last and perhaps greatest poem (which like the later first part of the Botanic Garden is an encyclopedic vision of the progress of knowledge contained in an allegorical and ritual framework), The Temple of Nature (1803), there is another extended use of the metaphor of the camera obscura which sums up the complexity of Darwin's thought on the subject. It is significant that the discussion occurs in Canto III which deals with problems in physics such as prisms, the electrolysis of water, and magnetism. Darwin wanted the prestige of physical laws to underwrite his discussion of psychology. Just as he had previously taken up Linnaeus' system of sexual classification as a metaphor for human sexual activity and ironically affirmed law just where law was most threatened, so he used the mechanics of linear vision to order dream and reverie. The paradoxes come out strongly in the following verse paragraph:

                    Slow could the tangent organ wander o'er
The rock-built mountain, and the winding shore;
No apt ideas could the pigmy mite,
Or embryon emmet to the touch excite;
But as each mass the solar ray reflects,
The eye's clear glass the transient beams collects;
Bends to their focal point the rays that swerve,
And paints the living image on the nerve.
So in some village-barn, or festive hall
The spheric lens illumes the whiten'd wall;
O'er the bright field successive figures fleet,
And motley shadows dance along the sheet.
Symbol of solid forms is colour'd light,
And the mute language of the touch is sight.(21)

Earlier the model of the camera obscura was an analogy for dream consciousness. Here it is used to describe the normal processes of perception. This directly contradictory use of the same image reflects the uncertainty of Darwin as to how much pure linear vision can encompass the totality of experience.

Much of the work of Robert John Thornton extends and glosses the work of Erasmus Darwin. Like Darwin, Thornton was also a medical practitioner with a strong interest in botany. Indeed given the then current intensive use of herbs in medical practice he could not fail to be.²² Like Darwin he also busied himself with the problems of the authenticity of visual proof in science and with the nature of dream and passion. His Philosophy of Medicine which appeared in 1813 is like a prose version of the Temple of Nature. Its encyclopedic assemblage of information codified by a sense of history and philosophy as time-doomed rituals provides a framework for its scientific outlook. In his account of the history of chemistry, Thornton declares himself in favor of visual proof in science. He declares that the physical sciences where

… palpable masses of matter are brought into action, and motion is visible in its progress, should sooner advance toward perfection than the chemical, where effects are produced by the insensible movements of imperceptible particles.²³

And in a later section, Of Vision, he paraphrases Darwin (following an account of the anatomy of the eye) as follows:

Thus we have a perfect camera obscura, with its different lenses; and the image painted in the darkened chamber of the eye (owing to the reflection of the rays of light from the objects around), by affecting the optic nerve, presents to the mind the varied and agreeable impression.²⁴

And taking the operation a stage further back he continues:

The brain may therefore be compared to a carte blanch, receiving every impression; and to a cabinet, wherein the different portions of the universe are painted in miniature, and may be drawn out at pleasure.²⁵

What can be seen now becomes the basis of truth, and the definition of the workings of the eye in terms of a camera obscura objectively reflecting reality endows such a basis with scientific law. Such simplified schemes, however, brought their own problems. This mode of perceiving reality depended upon an acceptance of the passivity of sense impressions and on a merely reflective or imitative theory of imagination. It appears, almost as a natural consequence of such a stable account of perception and experience, that both Darwin and Thornton are fascinated by abnormal psychology. What happens, they ask, when the inner image does not correspond to a view of reality based on common sense assumptions?

Like Darwin, Thornton has no mechanical theory for what happens when things begin to go wrong. The impulse to place the differentiated and complex patterns of human psychology into simplified categories of order sometimes leads to strange results. His definition of the ganglions (in eighteenth-century medicine these are knots along the nerve lines) involves regarding them as safety barriers to an overexcitation of the passions. But in addition to physiological aids to preserving psychic equilibrium, he also invents specific categories of moral order to which he gives an invariable and absolute biological authority. In a description of one such category called “cheerfulness,” for example, he recounts a dream in which an old hag leads him through a Salvator Rosa-like landscape, stating that misery is the “duty of all sublunary beings.” The narrator continues: “I threw myself beneath a blasted yew, where the winds blew cold and dismal round my head, and dreadful apprehensions chilled my heart.”²⁶ The hag's allegorical opposite, “Religion,” states that “cheerfulness” is a state of mind which “though it does not give the mind such exquisite gladness, prevents us from falling into any depths of sorrow.”²⁷ The philosophy is neither very convincing nor profound but it does show the uncertainty with which Thornton seeks for evidence to keep the stable balanced world view implied in the camera obscura image authoritative and plausible. All styles of proof, whether medical or physical, religious or psychological, are variously invoked to bolster an increasingly threatened view of normality.

If the metaphor of the camera obscura defines both objective reality and human psychology, what are the implications of such a mode of vision? Its chief importance lies in the implications of perspective and theatre. The visual illusion of perspective such as is found in the principle of the camera obscura creates a sense of depth and wholeness by representing objects in relative proportions on a two-dimensional surface. The viewpoint of the spectator is also stable and fixed. From the scientific point of view it assumed that light traveled in straight lines so that its reality was an inherent property of the laws of physics. As we have already seen it points in turn to a stable universe where objects have hierarchical positions defined by the fixed viewpoint. Painting itself had long since given up strict perspective but the scientific tradition continued it for its own specialized investigations.

The other place where visual perspective remained important was in the theatre, where the illusion of reality in representation was essentially thought to be the same as that of a picture. Again and again Darwin and Thornton use dramatic analogies to explain their work. In technological terms, this adherence to a simple linear perspective was given new prestige by such inventions as the Eidophuskon, camera obscura, and “Transparencies.”²⁸ Even more than Darwin, Thornton thinks in terms of the interconnections of flower garden and theatre. A garden of flowers, after all, reflected in its visible manifestation of law the scheme of the mechanical drama of the universe. In a later work, The Religious Use of Botany being an Introduction to the Science (London, 1824), he sums up the connection in a quotation from Rousseau: “This herbarium of mine recommences for a journey of delight, and as a camera obscura, repaints all this scenery again to my view.”²⁹ For Thornton, however, undoubtedly encouraged by Darwin's personifications of the generation of flowers in Loves of the Plants, it was above all a representative drama of society itself:

Some Flowers rear their heads with a majestic mien; and overlook, like sovereigns or nobles, the whole parterre. Others seem more moderate in their aims, and advance only to the middle stations; a genius turned for heraldry might term them, the gentry of the border. While others, free from all aspiring views, creep unambitiously on the ground, and look like the commonality of the kind.³⁰

And on the function of gardeners, Thornton continues:

What goodness is this to provide such a series of gratifications for mankind! both to diversify, and perpetuate the drama! to take care that our paths should be, in a manner, incessantly strewed with flowers:—And what wisdom, to bid every one of these insensible beings know the precise juncture of their coming forth! insomuch that no actor on a stage can be more exact in performing his part; can make a more regular entry, or a more punctual exit.³¹

The social implications of such a viewpoint are quite clear. Every man has his place, is separate and individual in his own space. Character and action are separable like the scenery and hero on a stage. Painting, poetry, and drama were all representative illusions which could be characterized by the mechanical model of linear perspective representing a stable world picture. Unfortunately, as the metaphor of the camera obscura shows, such a view may also be considered as pure illusion. For Darwin and Thornton passion, sexuality, and madness continually threatened the security of this fixed point of view in which everything appeared in just proportion and harmony.

What Thornton shared with and in part inherited from Darwin, then, was a totally ambiguous sense of vision based on the conflicting mode of linear vision as at once illusion and reality, a sense of myth and science as complementary and self-confirming rituals, a sense of history and drama both ritualistic and time-obsessed, an emphasis on visual proof in authenticating experience, and finally an allegorizing mentality which operates according to some platonic dimension of reference which enables visual and semantic transference to operate on a near totally abstract level.

There is no doubt that Thornton was fully involved in Darwin's work. The Philosophy of Botany (1799) quotes Darwin as if he were some intellectual presiding deity. The same catholic range of scientific material is drawn on and there is much quotation from The Botanic Garden. The interaction of poetic and scientific analogy in the cause of ahistoric proof is similar. In a section discussing the earth's internal heat, for example, he draws on the work of scientists (Darwin, Buffon, Whiston, Mayow, Lemerey, and Hook) and poets and philosophers (Lucretius, Milton, Ovid, and Berkeley) without qualitatively distinguishing their intentions or usefulness. In 1813 Thornton's Philosophy of Medicine appeared which was once more an encyclopedic assemblage of information appearing within an evolutionary framework of the progress of knowledge. For example, the plates which open the first volume begin with one called Omnia metit tempus where the figure of Time with a scythe turns Greek temples to ruin. Historical timelessness as ruin is emphasized by the pyramids in the background while a volcano, symbolizing natural ruinous change, erupts near the pyramids. There follow portraits of famous scientists in the history of medicine which symbolize a different type of immortality though stemming from the same kind of historical consciousness. Galen sits contemplating human skeletons like a medieval monk a skull. These complete the picture of inducements to morality in the face of a universe which is at once evolutionary and ahistorical. These dramatic and essentially literary pictures conclude with a series of straight anatomical engravings ending with a picture called Emblems of Immortality in which oak and acorn, chrysalis and butterfly point to cycles of regeneration.

These diverse subjects, natural landscape, architectural ruins, religion, anatomy, all subserve the presuppositions of natural religion. As in Darwin the procession of great men symbolizes the chief characters of time who reveal the laws of the universe. These are the actors in the history of time.

The success of Thornton's pictures is owing to his ability to encompass all these aspects of the sense of vision in a single and unique work. …

Notes

1. There are several pages devoted to Thornton in Wilfrid Blunt's standard The Art of Botanical Illustration (London, 1950) and more recently Geoffrey Grigson reproduced the plates with an introduction. See Thornton's Temple of Flora with the plates faithfully reproduced from the original engravings and the work described by Geoffrey Grigson with Bibliographical Notes by Handasyde Buchanan (London, 1959).

2. From a poem called “The Midnite Show” (Jonathan Williams, Amen/Huzza/Selah [1960]). It is also in Jonathan Williams, An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems, 1957-1967 (Chapel Hill, 1969).

3. The Pastorals of Virgil (London, 1821), facing page 13.

4. Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Writings of William Blake (London, 1925), p. 387.

5. James L. Larson, “The Species Concept of Linnaeus,” Isis, 59 (1968), 299.

6. Francis Bacon, Works (London, 1778), V, 47, contains the following statement: “In actu visus visibilia ex una parte non impediunt visibilia ex aliis partibus; quin universa quae se offerunt undiquaque visibilia, terrae, acquae, sylvae, sol, aedificia, homines, simul ob oculos repraesentantur. Quod si totidem voces aut soni ex diversis partibus simul salirent, confunderetur plane auditus nec ea distincte percipere posset.” Sight hence separates and classifies objects in a landscape. This is Erasmus Darwin's edition.

7. Lichfield Botanical Society, The Families of Plants (London, 1787), p. lxxix.

8. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts. Part I containing The Economy of Vegetation, Part II The Loves of the Plants with philosophical notes (London, 1791), II, 43.

9. Donald Allen, ed., Human Universe and Other Essays by Charles Olson (New York, 1967), p. 5.

10. General introduction to The Botanic Garden, pp. vii-viii.

11. Irwin Primer, “Erasmus Darwin's Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and the Eleusinian Mysteries,” JHI [Journal of the History of Ideas], 25 (1964), 58-76.

12. The Families of Plants, p. xix.

13. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 14-15. See Primer for ritualistic and political implications of The Temple of Nature.

14. Loves of the Plants, pp. 12-13.

15. Ibid., p. 164.

16. Ibid., pp. v-vi.

17. Ibid., pp. 47-48.

18. Ibid., p. 119.

19. Ibid., pp. 119-20.

20. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or the laws of Organic Life (London, 1794), I, 226.

21. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: A poem, with Philosophical Notes (London, 1803), p. 94.

22. See Robert John Thornton, A Family Herbal, 2nd ed. (London, 1814).

23. Robert John Thornton, The Philosophy of Medicine (London, 1813), I, 12.

24. Ibid., I, 338.

25. Ibid., I, 339.

26. Ibid., I, 357.

27. Ibid., I, 359.

28. See Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque (1927; rpt. London, 1967), pp. 239 f.

29. Robert John Thornton, The Religious Use of Botany … (London, 1824), p. 14.

30. Ibid., p. 21.

31. Ibid., p. 28.