Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
and far-reaching effects: frost fertilizes soil, purifies air, strengthens our bodies and our spirits (W, 747, 750). Describing the products of frost work in the same terms (of labor and work) that he uses to demand ethical consideration for domestics like sheep and oxen, Thomson implies that such consideration might extend beyond humans and animals to all the elements that toil for some greater good. Thomson’s domestic social vision—his image of a great chain that binds both nations and natural elements—seeks to incorporate all kinds of beings in a system of both economic and ethical obligation.
In many respects, this vision resembles the model of natural sociability associated with the moral sense tradition, and with Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, in particular—“generous ASHLEY,” whom Thomson sets alongside Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Newton in his roll of great British philosophers (Su, 1551). In its simplest and perhaps most familiar form, Shaftesburian philosophy grounds ethics in the natural affections of every creature, aligning private and public good, self-love and social affection. “In the passions and affections of particular creatures, there is a constant relation to the interest of a species or common nature,” Shaftesbury writes in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit; “nature has made it to be according to the private interest and good of everyone to work towards the general good.”56 Private and general interest line up in this way because for Shaftesbury, as for Thomson, every particular creature essentially is an element in some composition. Whether one is a human or an animal or even an organ, one’s virtue and one’s identity depend on “that whole of which he is himself a part.”57 At times, Shaftesbury calls this whole the “public” or “society”; sometimes one’s “kind,” “species,” or “common nature”; sometimes he calls it an “economy” or “system”; sometimes it is simply the “general” or the “whole.”58 Shaftesbury’s various terms would seem to designate wholes of significantly different scope and kind (some social, some natural). But Shaftesbury does not discuss these differences, or even appear to view them as such. Instead, he insists that the same logic underwrites what might look like different types of relation: between two bodily organs, between the male and female of a species, between spider and fly, and potentially, between all living and nonliving beings. Everything in nature, Shaftesbury suggests, is a part of an ever-expanding whole, which he calls “an animal order or economy”: “If a whole species of animals contributes to the existence or well-being of some other, then is that whole species, in general, a part of some other system…. Now, if the whole system of animals, together with that of vegetables and all other things in this inferior world, be properly comprehended in one system of a globe or earth and if, again, this globe or earth itself appears to have a real dependence on something still beyond, as, for example, either on its sun, the galaxy or its fellow-planets, then is it in reality a part only of some other system.”59 Ultimately, Shaftesbury suggests, one might be comprehended by a system of uncertain and potentially unlimited proportions.
Thomson takes up Shaftesbury’s expansive vision as both an epistemological challenge and an ethical imperative. Like Shaftesbury, Thomson wants to ground a universal ethics on an ontology in which one’s identity essentially depends on the whole of which one is a part—a whole that again is alternately presented in economic, social, and ecological terms. But Thomson’s Shaftesburian vision takes some peculiar turns, not least because of the central role Thomson accords personification in composing the great system of nature, the vast animal order or economy of which every one is a part. Some of the most heavily personified sections of The Seasons are those in which Thomson is most closely engaged with matters of natural-philosophical knowledge—with describing nature as it actually is. When Thomson sets out to replace the older hydrologic theory of percolation with the new theory of condensation, for example, he begins by depicting the former as the product of improper personification:
But hence this vain
Amusive Dream! Why should the Waters love
To take so far a Journey to the Hills,
When the sweet Valleys offer to their Toil
Inviting Quiet, and a nearer Bed?
Or if, by blind Ambition led astray,
They must aspire; why should they sudden stop
Among the broken Mountain’s rushy Dells[?] (A, 756–63)
This passage does not suggest that percolation theory is a “vain / Amusive Dream” because it personifies a natural object, attributing agency and affections to water. Instead, Thomson insists that percolation theory is an amusive dream because it attributes a particular kind of agency and affection: water is led by “blind Ambition” to toil alone, ignoring the invitations of the “sweet Valleys.” Thomson supplants this picture of a solitary self with a vision of harmonious system:
I see the Rivers in their infant Beds!
Deep deep I hear them, lab’ring to get free!
I see the leaning Strata, artful rang’d; The gaping Fissures to receive the Rains, The melting Snows, and ever-dripping Fogs. Strow’d bibulous above I see the Sands, The pebbly Gravel next, the Layers then, Of mingled Moulds, or more retentive Earths, The gutter’d Rocks and mazy-running Clefts; That, while the stealing Moisture they transmit, Retard its Motion, and forbid its Waste. (A, 808–18)
In this passage, Thomson does not replace personification with a more naturalist mode of description. Instead, he reconfigures personification so that it does not picture a central agent toiling without regard to others, but instead composes a system of relations that unites its elements and directs their movement:
United, thus,
Th’ exhaling sun, the Vapour-burden’d Air,
The gelid Mountains, that to Rain condens’d
These Vapours in continual Current draw,
And send them o’er the fair-divided Earth,
In bounteous Rivers to the Deep again,
A social Commerce hold, and firm support
The full-adjusted Harmony of Things. (A, 828–35)
Throughout this section, Thomson uses personification to compose a Shaftesburian animal economy, a “social Commerce” in which all sorts of “Things” are animated by affections that are directed to the good of the whole. Sun, air, mountains—and even more intricately, rivers, strata, fissures, rain, snows, fogs, sands, gravels, rocks, and clefts—all work together toward one end.
At the same time that this kind of passage envisions sociability on an explicitly Shaftesburian model, it also brings the uniqueness of Thomson’s social vision into focus. Throughout his work, Shaftesbury often turns to the figure of the animal in a way that is fairly familiar: in order to naturalize social organization, granting the authority of nature to everything from heterosexual coupling, to class distinctions, to a carnivorous diet. Thomson does something more unusual. Like Shaftesbury, Thomson takes the animal as a model for the kind of society he is after, and for the movement that brings such society into being. But in Thomson, the animal and its economy is not natural in the way that it is for Shaftesbury—something given, logically prior to the material labor of social organization or the figurative work of poetic composition. The Thomsonian animal—and so, Thomsonian nature—is a self-consciously rhetorical product, the effect of personification understood as a literary, social, and material operation. This vision of nature distinguishes Thomson from Shaftesbury, and the difference is marked by their respective key terms: Thomson’s “people” and Shaftesbury’s “species,” a term that Thomson, despite his interest in natural history, does not use.60 In other words, if Thomson seems to follow Shaftesbury in suggesting that the social order is natural, this is in part because he everywhere imagines the natural order in social terms. On Thomson’s view, nature is indeed one great domestic society, a “full-adjusted Harmony of Things” supported by “social Commerce.” But although this social commerce extends (at least ideally) to all of nature, it is not exactly natural. It is both made and made visible by means of personification.
Wilderness, Selfhood, and the Limits of Domestic Society
If