Natural Things and Non-Natural Things. The Boundaries of the Hereditary in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This paper aims at establishing the conceptual boundaries within which the transmission of physical and moral hereditary peculiarities were conceived during the eighteenth century in Europe. The domain of the hereditary in the period was linked to the passing down of accidental bodily features that could somehow be transmitted through the pathways of biological reproduction. At the same time, everything associated with the reproduction of essential bodily features lay conceptually outside the notion of the hereditary. The different eighteenth century views of reproduction adopted this dichotomy, which represented an internal boundary for the notion of heredity. The prevalence in the same period of the Galenic scheme of the Natural and the Non-Natural (things) allows a complementary exploration of the external boundary for hereditary transmission. The possibility that the body (constitution, temperament) could by some external influences be transformed, and that those changes could under some circumstances be communicated to the offspring defined the negotiation of this second boundary.