Natur og Aand

Nielsen’s last large systematic work, published by Schubothe in 1873, the same year as the essay »Et Synspunkt for Darwinismen« in For Ide og Virkelighed. The programme is in the subtitle: Bidrag til en med Physiken stemmende Naturphilosophie — a contribution to a philosophy of nature that agrees with physics. The word does the work. Nielsen is not proposing to legislate to the physicists, and he says so at length before he begins; he is proposing that there are questions the science of experience cannot take up without ceasing to be itself, and that these are the questions a philosophy of nature exists to take up.

The Indledning (pp. XI–XIV) sets the enemies on both sides. Against the popular scientism of the 1870s: natural science, “naar den holder sig indenfor Erfaringens Grændser,” cannot own as its task the solving of the riddle of existence, and the many mutually combating world-views that appeal to “Videnskaben” cannot all have its support. That a famous investigator holds it probable that man is a modified ape does not make the opinion a fact, still less a dogma; a distinction is to be made “mellem Kjendsgjerningernes Udtydning og Kjendsgjerningerne selv.” Hence the book’s best-known sentence about hypotheses:

Enhver Hypothese har, saa at sige, to Ansigter, et, strengt, alvorligt, der er vendt imod Kjendsgjerningerne og ufravendt sigter paa Opdagelsen af deres skjulte Sammenhæng, et andet, smilende, mere indsmigrende, der tiltaler Almeenheden og vil erobre sig en Plads blandt dens Yndlingsdoctriner.

Every hypothesis has, so to speak, two faces: one severe and earnest, turned toward the facts and aiming unswervingly at the discovery of their hidden connection; another smiling, more ingratiating, which addresses the general public and would win itself a place among its favourite doctrines. And against the other side — Schelling, Hegel, “Immanentsphilosophien,” which is the book’s standing adversary — the philosophy of nature “hverken skal bygge paa Hypotheser eller paa abstracte Speculationer.”

The argument

Everything rests on a doubling stated in three sentences of the Indledning (p. XIII). The collected impression of all contemplation of nature is an impression of power: “Naturen er et Magtens Rige.” Power shows itself from the sensuous side as a visible power in the series of phenomena, each member presupposing and pointing to another — otherness-power, outward power, Magt i Andet; and from the non-sensuous side as the invisible power of thoughts, of concepts, of ideas — Selvmagt. Out of this doubling the philosophy of nature develops its two concepts: “af Magten i Andet Begrebet Natur, af Selvmagtens Væsen Begrebet Aand.” Both terms are letterspaced in the print. The method follows at once, and is modest: “Erfaringslæren fremstiller Naturen i dens eget Lys; Naturphilosophien fremstiller den i Aandens Lys. Vil den forandrede Belysning være i Stand til at aabne os nye Indblik i de mechaniske, elementære og organiske Natursphærer? Det maa komme an paa et Forsøg.” It must depend upon an attempt. The three spheres named in that question are the three Parts of the book.

Part One, Den mechaniske Natur (pp. 1–196). Foundational concepts first (space and time, matter and force, forces and laws), then mechanical causes, then the mechanics of the heavens. The cause-chapters are the most technical philosophy in the book: force resolved into accelerating, moving and living force; cause resolved into condition, cause and conditioned cause; then the question whether the moments of the cause are ideal or real, answered “ideal-real.” The astronomical chapter is written as a history with a thesis — the Ptolemaic structure as the illusion, the Copernican as reflexion, and then “the discussion: three hypotheses” — running through Kepler’s laws and gravitation to the universe as a system of systems, and closing on the origin of the solar system. There Nielsen grants the nebular hypothesis its physics and refuses its metaphysics: the primal nebula with which the beginning is made must itself have an origin, so Oprindelse and Begyndelse are not the same question, and the old dispute between teleology and mechanism is not settled by pushing the mechanism further back.

Part Two, Den elementære Natur (pp. 197–374). The elements, their functions, and the elemental whole. Nielsen opens historically — matter and element in the Greeks, matter and form as the simplest reconciliation, matter and substance in the atomists — and then gives his own account: the elements have an ideality and a reality, and beneath both a Grundmedium, a ground-medium, which is where the doubling of power reappears at this level. The functions are classified by what they do: light and heat are dynamic, magnetism and electricity articulating (leddelende), chemism body-forming. Each of the first two is taken twice over, from the objective and the subjective side — “Uden Syn intet Lys,” without sight no light — and then as an ideal-real nature. The Part ends on the body of the earth, treated as one elemental individual: atmosphere, crust and sea as its comprehending parts; land, sea and air, the zones and climates, the ocean and the great continents as its articulation; then the geognostic, the aesthetic and the teleological standpoints; then its history in three periods. Its last word is a paradox Nielsen wants: the earth is a selfless organism, an inorganic organism — organised through and through and yet with no self-being of its own.

Part Three, Den organiske Natur (pp. 375–549). Life is introduced as “organiserende Selvvæsen,” organising self-being, over against the being of matter; the organism is not life’s vehicle but life’s product and property. From this Nielsen derives the fundamental law of recollection (Erindringens Grundlov), which he uses against Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten at p. 400: a philosophy that must let a new soul begin life over again in every revived organism has mistaken the originality of self-being. The first chapter then works through individuals, species and genera to the systematics of the basic forms, which is where Darwin enters (below). The second chapter is the book’s anthropology in ascending order: the plant is life without soul, an organism without limbs; the animal has soul and body, sense- consciousness, and a weak individuality; and then — “Mennesket er ikke et Dyr” — man, through self-consciousness, conscience and personality. Nielsen concedes comparative anatomy everything it asks (the unlikenesses between an ass’s head and a man’s are “forsvindende”), and locates the difference where the anatomist does not look.

The concluding chapter, Slutning: Natur og Aand (pp. 509–549), is the book in miniature, in three theses: nature is created by Spirit, nature is sustained by Spirit, nature is explained by Spirit. The first asks whether nature can be created and answers by examining three relations — of essence between self-power and power in another, of ground between absolute freedom and conditioned necessity, and of cause between Spirit’s will and nature’s constitution. The second turns on the unalterability of the laws of nature, which Nielsen will not soften: sustaining is not intervening. The third is a theodicy of a sort — discord and harmony, enjoyment and suffering, life and death — and it is the hardest stretch in the book. Death releases the individual but is the enemy of life’s idea; if life’s dying is to last for ever, “saa er Modsigelsen ikke paa Dødens, men paa Livets Side,” and since nature’s highest would then be a contradiction, and nature comes from Spirit, Spirit would be the original contradiction. Nielsen answers with the two fundamental laws — recollection on the side of Spirit, real development on the side of nature — and with the claim that the laws of life require of nature itself a second, ideal-empirical actuality that we do not know, and therefore a “Naturforvandling,” a transformation of nature. The last sentence, letterspaced in the print:

Naturlivets Maal er et Aandens Maal, Magten i Andet er Selvmagtens reale Moment: al Naturvirkelighed er i evig Forstand Aandsvirkelighed, Virkelighed for Aanden.

The goal of natural life is a goal of Spirit, the power in another is self-power’s real moment: all actuality of nature is in the eternal sense actuality of Spirit, actuality for Spirit.

The text

Complete, and complete in both languages. The Danish transcription covers the whole book: Indhold (pp. V–X), Indledning (pp. XI–XIV), body pp. 1–549, and the unfoliated Trykfeil leaf — 549 of 549 pages, no gaps and no duplicates. The English translation covers the Indledning and the whole body, pp. 1–549, and is made from the transcription rather than from the scan. Division and chapter heads are given in English with the Danish kept in a comment above each, so the two files stay checkable against one another line by line. The Indhold is not translated — the English contents are generated from the heads — and neither is the Trykfeil leaf, whose entries correct Danish type.

Editorial note

Two physical copies. A Google scan serves as the working text and the Royal Library’s colour scan (DOD) as the second witness, and both were needed. The Google file is 1-bit JBIG2, a symbol-substitution codec that can swap one glyph image for another silently, so no doubtful single letter was settled on it; worse, the copy Google scanned had been worked through in pencil by a previous owner applying Nielsen’s own errata, so at an errata site the working scan is liable to show the corrected reading rather than the printed one. All 32 errata sites were therefore read on the KB copy. The Google file is also a Sammelband: its last 118 leaves are the 1870 Grundideernes Logik i kort Begreb, transcribed separately. The “689 pp.” this catalogue once gave for the book was that PDF’s page count.

Page maps, both uniform and both verified whole: printed = working PDF − 21, checked against that file’s text layer for all 689 of its pages; printed = KB PDF − 19, checked by content match on 23 samples from p. 2 to p. 549, since that file has no text layer.

Three folios are misprinted in the type and agree in both copies: 357 prints as “257”, 394 as “294”, 395 as “295”. The pages are marked here by their true number and the misprint logged at the site.

Diplomatic throughout, in the English as in the Danish. The book’s own corrections are not applied; each is noted at its site so a reader sees both what was printed and what the author wanted. Turned and wrong sorts stand as printed — Betydniug, Huusholduing, Reprodnctionen, Erindriugslov, Mnlighed, maattc, hunne — as do trebled letters (gjennnem, Fosterdannnelsen), missing stops, and the division head on p. 233 that prints “B.” where the sequence and the errata leaf both require “C.” The most striking defect is not a letter at all: the first chapter of the Third Part breaks off in mid-sentence at the foot of p. 444, “…maaler sig med den Darwinske,” with no closing word and no full stop, followed by the closing rule and the next chapter. It is so in both copies and the errata leaf is silent about it. It is reproduced as printed in both files; nothing has been supplied.

Mathematics. Unlike every other book in this collection, this one contains real mathematics. Of the 549 printed pages, 83 carry mathematical setting — counted by taking every page in transcription.tex with math mode in the body, excluding the errata leaf — most densely through the mechanics of Part One (pp. 64–115) and the elemental functions of Part Two (pp. 251–286), though some of that is chemical formulae and temperatures rather than algebra. The high point is the footnote to p. 160, which runs over two leaves and derives all three Keplerian laws from Newton’s principles in polar coordinates, integrating to the conic-section orbit, the area law, and T²/a³ = 4π²/μ. Nielsen’s notation is kept as he sets it, including his own minus sign ÷ and his tang and Radius vector; the formulas were copied from the image, not retyped from OCR, which is not a witness on those pages.

The comment header of transcription.tex carries the same record at greater length, page by page, and remains the authority: it was written at the image while the transcription was being made.

Reading

The Darwin chapter (pp. 424–444) is the reason to read the book now. It is not the anti-Darwinian tract the date and the author might suggest. Nielsen sets out the hypothesis at length and largely in Darwin’s own words — species and varieties, the laws of variation, the fertility of hybrids, with long quotations from the Origin cited by page — and grants it its empirical case. His objection is to the systematics, not to the descent: a classification founded on the physiological alone is “abstractly teleological,” and he proposes instead a “continued system of naturally conditioned creations,” in which acts of creation set the qualitative boundaries and physical descent supplies the transitions between them. The conclusion is more accommodating than any of his readers seem to expect. So far is the doctrine of peculiar, nature-grounding acts of creation from standing in conflict with the Darwinian hypothesis, he writes, that it “tvertimod, hvad Principet angaaer, har i denne Hypothese sin bedste empiriske Støtte” — on the contrary has, as regards the principle, its best empirical support in that hypothesis. A footnote on p. 444 goes further: “Mennesket kan — i sit Anlæg — være skabt Millioner Aar, før det traadte frem paa Jorden,” man may, in his constitution, have been created millions of years before he stepped forth on the earth. Then the sentence breaks off.

The relation to the rest of Nielsen. The book cites Grundideernes Logik i kort Begreb at pp. 118 and 443, on the rational and the antirational, and the doubling of power into Magt i Andet and Selvmagt is worth setting beside the uensartede Størrelser of the 1849 controversy: whether the later doctrine is the earlier one carried into the philosophy of nature, or a different distinction wearing similar clothes, is a question this edition makes it possible to ask but does not settle.

What is not here. The philosophy of nature, Nielsen says at p. XIV, “betragter jo ikke Naturen for Aandens Skyld, men omvendt, Aanden for Naturens Skyld” — it considers Spirit for the sake of nature, and does not set out to exhaust the doctrine of Spirit. Readers coming to the book for Nielsen’s theology will find it standing just off the edge of every page, and nowhere argued.

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