The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
a touch of doubt concerning the adequacy of increasingly mechanistic
modes of explanation. Mr Fitz-Poodle experiences a disturbing dream,
which influences his decision not to accompany his wife on a shopping
trip the following day, a development that is explained in the following
terms: ‘Dreams, although we disbelieve in them — we wise ones — have
still some influence over our waking thoughts. … The complex machine
called Man is not so well put together as to be always in perfect order.’ 26
In this passage, it is suggested that explanations which insist upon the
explicability of all phenomena in terms of physical causes and effects
(such as conceptualizations of the human body in terms of machinery)
cannot satisfactorily explain all human behaviour, and for this reason
a romantic fascination for the significance of dreams is shown to have
a continuing appeal.
At least on the surface of things, however, a more rationalist approach
did prevail in the mid-nineteenth century, under the aegis of
science. 27 Unlike romantic science, which visualized the connectivity
of the physical and metaphysical, mid-nineteenth-century science was
profoundly materialist, insisting upon the foundation of all things in
the physical laws of nature. Auguste Comte exemplified this tendency
in his elaboration of ‘positivism’ or the argument that all knowledge
should be founded upon the observation and analysis of the external
or apparent characteristics of phenomena. Indeed, Comte argued that
human culture was developing from what he termed the ‘theological
state’, in which supernatural fictions constituted explanatory systems,
through the ‘metaphysical state’, in which supernatural fictions were
replaced by abstract concepts, into the scientific or ‘positive’ state,
which he saw as the final stage of knowledge. The gradual disassociation
of the werewolf from the realm of the supernatural, and its increasing
representation in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon or
belief deriving from natural causes, would in fact suggest that Comte’s
ideas were in many ways an accurate description of shifting analytical
strategies. The scientific philosophy exemplified by Comte, however,
while it foregrounded the laws of nature as the building blocks of all
knowledge, still tended to debase nature by objectifying it as a plenum
to be acted upon, controlled and manipulated by humankind.
19