The metaphor of the sylva or forest is significant. A forest is not ordered according to clear binary disjunctions; instead it is a labyrinth. The labyrinth is explicitly mentioned in the preface to the Instauratio Magna (1620): “Aedificium autem hujus universi, structura sua, intellectui humano contemplanti, instar labyrinthi est; ubi tot ambigua viarum, tam fallaces rerum et signorum similitudines, tam obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi, undequaque se ostendunt” (“But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, so many deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled”).24 To the contemplating intellect, the edifice of the universe manifests itself as a labyrinth, with a maze of ambiguous routes, of deceptive appearances of things and signs, of winding and complicated nodes and spirals—and we will see eventually, apropos of the rhizomic nature of an encyclopedia, how truly prophetic this vision of “obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi” would prove to be.
In this labyrinth, which no longer presents itself as a logical division but as a rhetorical accumulation of notions and topics arranged under loci, the Latin verb invenire (= to find or discover) no longer means to find something one already knew existed, sitting in its proper place, ready to be used for the purposes of argument, but truly to discover some new thing, or the relationship between two or more things, that one was previously unaware of. Such a situation represents (as Rossi 1957, IV and V reminds us) the complete and radical refusal of any preestablished hierarchy among beings. Pursuing an idea that will be taken up again later by Leibniz, in the Advancement of Learning Bacon points out that, if a secretary of state is obliged to accumulate a series of records in his official place of business, he will classify them according to the nature of the document (treaties, instructions, etc.), whereas in his private study he will keep all the papers that require his immediate attention together, even though they may be of a heterogeneous nature. The Great Chain of Being is a thing of the past, and from now on every subdivision will invariably be made in context and directed toward a specific end.
1.3.4. The
Cannocchiale aristotelico
of Emanuele Tesauro
We have seen how with Bacon the idea of inventio (the noun derived from the verb invenire) undergoes a sea change and, instead of referring to the search for something already familiar, is transformed into the discovery of something not yet known. But in this case hunting through the repertory of knowledge is like rummaging through an immense warehouse whose extent is not yet known, and rummaging not simply to put what one finds, whatever it may be, to use, but to construct, so to speak, a bricolage, discovering new syntheses, connections and dovetailings among things that at first sight did not appear to have any reciprocal relationship.
An encyclopedic model is paradoxically offered by Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (“Aristotelian Telescope,” 1665). I say “paradoxically” because, in the very century in which the model of Galileo’s telescope comes into its own as the paradigmatic instrument for the development of the natural sciences, Tesauro proposes a telescope named after Aristotle as an instrument for renewal of what today we would call the human sciences, and the instrument he proposes is metaphor. In the Cannocchiale, however, we recognize the fundamental nucleus of Aristotelian rhetoric (of which more in section 1.8.1), and the model of metaphor is proposed as a means of discovering unfamiliar relations among the elements of knowledge, though Tesauro’s interest, unlike Bacon’s, is rhetorical rather than scientific.
To construct a repertory of known things, scrolling through which the metaphorical imagination may be led to discover unknown relationships, Tesauro develops the idea of a Categorical Index. He presents his index (with Baroque complaisance for the “marvelous” invention) as a “truly secret secret,” an inexhaustible mine of infinite metaphors and ingenious conceits, given that genius is nothing more or less than the ability to “penetrate the objects deeply hidden beneath the various categories and compare them among themselves”—the ability, in other words, to unearth analogies and similarities that would have passed unnoticed had everything remained classified under its own particular category.
It is sufficient, then, to inscribe in a book Aristotle’s ten categories, the Substance and the nine Accidents, and then list under each category its Members and under each Member the Things “subject to it.”
All we can do for our present purposes is to give a few meager examples of the extensive catalogue Tesauro provides (susceptible in any case of constant expansion). Thus, under the category of Substance, are to be recorded as Members the Divine Persons, Ideas, the Fabulous Gods, Angels, Demons, and Sprites; then, under the Member Heaven, the Wandering Stars, the Zodiac, Vapors, Air, Meteors, Comets, Torches, Thunderbolts, and Winds; and then, under Earth, Fields, Solitudes, Mountains, Hills, and Promontories; under Bodies, Stones, Gems, Metals, Herbs; under Mathematics, Orbs and Globes, Compasses, and Squares; and so on and so forth.
Likewise, for the category of Quantity, under the Quantity of Size are listed the Small, the Large, the Long, and the Short; under the Quantity of Weight, the Heavy and the Light. For the category of Quality, under Sight we find the Visible and the Invisible, the Apparent, the Handsome and the Misshapen, the Bright and the Dark, the White and the Black; under Scent, Sweet Odor and Stench—and so on through the categories of Relation, Action and Passion, Site, Time, Place, and State.
When we take a closer look at the Things subordinate to these Members, we find that, under the category of Quantity and the Member Size, among small things we find the angels (which fit within a point), the incorporeal forms, the pole as the unmoving point of the sphere, the zenith and the nadir; among Elementary Things the spark of fire, the droplet of water, the grain of sand, the scruple of stone, the gem, and the atom; among Human Things, the embryo, the abortus, the pigmy, and the dwarf; among Animals, the ant and the flea; among Plants, the mustard seed and the crumb of bread; among the Sciences, the mathematical point; in Architecture the tip of a pyramid; under Lanaria, the metal tip of a lace, and so on with a list that goes on for two pages.
We have no need to ask ourselves just how congruous this list is. Incongruity seems to be typical of all of the efforts made in the Baroque period to give an account of the global contents of a field of knowledge, just as it is equally characteristic of many seventeenth-century projects for artificial languages. Gaspar Schott, in his Technica curiosa (1664) and his Joco-seriorum naturae et artis sive magiae naturalis centuriae tres (ca. 1666) gave notice of a work published in 1653, whose author’s name he claims to have forgotten. In fact the anonymous author seems to have been a certain Pedro Bermudo (1610–1648), a Spanish Jesuit who presented in Rome an Artificium or Arithmeticus nomenclator, mundi omnes nationes ad linguarum et sermonis unitatem invitans. Authore linguae (quod mirere) Hispano quodam, vere, ut dicitur, muto.25 It is doubtful whether Schott’s is a faithful description, but the issue is irrelevant, since, even if Schott had reworked the project after his own fashion, what interests us is the incongruity of the list. The Artificium provided for forty-four fundamental classes, which are worth listing here, giving only a few examples in parentheses: