Form

The idea of form gathers several meanings under one word. It names the shape of a thing as the eye takes it in. It names the pattern or plan that many things share. It names the essence that makes a thing what it is, and it names the eternal ideas that some philosophers have thought stand behind all particular things. Wherever the word appears it is usually paired with a partner. Form is set against matter, against shapelessness, against accident, against life, or against substance. To ask what form is therefore means asking how anything can be both one kind of thing and a perishable, particular stuff. That question runs through the Harvard Classics. It appears in Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul and in Dante’s theology of creation. It appears in the comparative anatomy of Darwin, in the aesthetics of Schiller and Coleridge, and in the cultural criticism of the nineteenth century. Few ideas pass so readily between metaphysics, natural science, art and religion. That ease of passage is itself a reason to study it.

The simplest use of the idea is analytic, a way of taking things apart in thought. Marcus Aurelius returns to it repeatedly as a discipline of the mind. He holds that the investigation of truth divides the material in a thing from the cause of its form¹, and that man himself is composed of the formal and the material². He advises considering an object’s form apart from its matter and asking how long a thing of that form naturally endures³. Applied to whatever disturbs us, the analysis is meant to calm. Such things reduce to form and matter and nothing besides⁴. In one place he adds a third term and counsels resolving things into matter, form and purpose⁵. For the Stoic emperor the division is less a theory of being than an exercise that strips away false importance. Dante, by contrast, sees in the formal principle the deepest unity of the world. At the summit of his vision he beholds a universal form binding substance and accident together into one light⁶. Sir Walter Raleigh uses the same pairing in argument, reasoning that because the form matter received was finite, matter itself must have been finite⁷. The modern break shows plainly in Descartes. In imagining a world built anew, he supposes a matter that has none of the forms and qualities disputed in the Schools⁸. This is a deliberate setting aside of the whole vocabulary the earlier authors took for granted.

How form comes to be in matter is a question Dante answers with an image. The divine idea stamps created things as a seal stamps wax. Where the wax is imperfect, the impression is imperfect⁹. The same figure explains why the heavens differ in virtue. Each sphere takes the impress of its mover as from a seal, and different formal principles account for different powers¹⁰. The image carries a theory of failure. Form often falls short of the art’s design because matter is unresponsive, much as creatures swerve from their proper course¹¹. When Dante is troubled that the copy, the visible universe, does not correspond to its exemplar, Beatrice teaches him to measure by virtue and not by bulk¹². Dante also insists that form and matter are not stages in time. Pure form, pure matter and their composite came forth together in a single act¹³. Matter is never formless stuff waiting to be shaped. It is created already joined to form, though it may receive form more or less well.

If form is the principle of a thing’s being, what becomes of it when the thing decays? Sir Thomas Browne gives a remarkable answer. The forms of alterable bodies do not perish in corruption. They withdraw into an incombustible part, from which the skilled artist can recall them¹⁴. Ashes, on this view, return to their primary and predestined forms, as the species were separated from one another at creation¹⁵. Form here is nearly indestructible, and Browne plainly sees in it an analogy to resurrection. Dante treats the soul as the substantial form of the body. Spirit joined to matter has a specific power that is known only through its effects, as life in a plant is known through its green leaves¹⁶. Pascal sharpens the concept by marking a limit. A union that leaves both parties unchanged does not make one thing the form of the other. He thinks this distinction bears on how the Word is united with man, and soul with body¹⁷. To be a form, then, is a particular and demanding relation, and union alone does not establish it.

Behind all these medieval and Renaissance uses stands the doctrine of the Phaedo, where forms are not principles within things but essences apart from them. Socrates argues that absolute justice, beauty, good, and the essence of each thing are never seen with the eyes. They are grasped only by the intellect¹⁸. The essences of equality and beauty are simple, self-existent and unchanging, unlike the many beautiful things that vary and pass away¹⁹. Browne carries something of this into his angelology. Angels, he says, know things by their forms and define them by specific difference, whereas we must describe them by accidents and properties²⁰. The intuition is the same as Plato’s: the true nature of a thing is closed to sense and open only to a higher knowing.

The Phaedo also offers a theory of causation through forms. Beauty, greatness and smallness are posited as forms that cause the corresponding qualities in things²¹. A thing exists, and is what it is, only by participating in its proper essence²². The argument is refined with the example of number. Three is never without oddness, yet three is not identical with oddness²³. Whatever the number three takes possession of takes on its form and with it oddness, impressed by the odd principle²⁴. The language of impression links Plato to Dante’s seal. Yet for Plato the form stays apart from what bears its stamp, while for Dante the divine idea and the created form are distinct moments of a single creative act.

The Romantic writers reverse the direction of the dependence. Emerson declares that our philosophy has no doctrine of forms. Form depends instantly on soul, and the material world depends on thought²⁵. Thought has an architecture of its own and is prior to form in its genesis, though equal with it in time²⁶. All form is an effect of character, and the soul is form and makes the body²⁷. Shelley speaks of the one Spirit’s plastic stress, which compels all successions into the forms they wear²⁸. These writers keep the Platonic conviction that visible form expresses something invisible. They reject the independent, separate essence, however, and locate the source of form in a living spirit that is always active.

Natural science gives the idea a new and more empirical life. Darwin speaks of unity of type. The hand of man, the paw of the mole, the wing of the bat and the paddle of the porpoise are built on the same pattern despite their very different uses²⁹. Homologous parts keep the same invariable relative connexion and a uniform plan across mouths, limbs and flowers³⁰. Modification may alter both function and shape, but it does not transpose the underlying framework, even when the pattern becomes obscured³¹. Organs alike in the early embryo become extremely different in the adult, while still sharing one pattern³². Here form is neither a separate essence nor a seal from above. It is an inherited plan, which Darwin proposes to explain by common descent. The ancient sense of form as what many things share survives, now detached from any timeless order.

Other passages stress the fitting of structure to work. Raleigh insists that differences in working lie in the internal form and not in visible shape³³. This distinction recalls the old opposition between form as essence and form as figure. Harvey relates the thickness of the vessel walls proportionally to the strength of the ventricles they serve³⁴. Darwin shows that a bird’s long lower mandible and long primary feathers suit its manner of feeding³⁵. Faraday finds definite form in inorganic nature as well. Crystals break along definite directions, whereas glass has no definite shape³⁶.

Form as the common character of a species can also serve as a standard of judgment. Burke traces our regard for proportion not to any natural cause but to the idea of a species’ common form³⁷. Deformity is simply the lack of the complete common form we conceive of a kind³⁸. Goethe describes comparative anatomy as leading the mind from form to form until it rises to an ideal picture of the characteristics of organisms³⁹. Burke and Goethe both make the species form a norm. Burke’s norm is a habitual expectation of the kind. Goethe’s is an ideal reached by comparing many instances, which brings him closer to Plato’s ascent from the many to the one, though he arrives there by observation.

Schiller makes the pairing of form and matter the very axis of human nature. The speculative mind, he warns, loses sight of matter for the sake of form and models the real after the intelligible⁴⁰. The artist borrows form from the essential and immutable unity and takes matter from the present⁴¹. Man’s task is to give form to matter and reality to form, uniting the world’s diversity under the unity of the self⁴². The sensuous instinct has life as its object and the formal instinct has form. Their union is living form⁴³, which is beauty⁴⁴. A block of marble can become living form in the hands of a sculptor or architect, while a living man is not for that reason a living form⁴⁵. Beauty is an equilibrium between reality and form⁴⁶. It mediates between matter and form⁴⁷, and it is form because we contemplate it and life because we feel it⁴⁸.

Schiller’s balance tilts, however. In a truly beautiful work the substance is inoperative and the form does everything. Aesthetic liberty comes only from form overcoming matter⁴⁹, so that at its highest even music should become form, acting with the calm power of an antique statue⁵⁰. Boundless force is tamed by infinite form, and by impressing form on matter the spirit secures its freedom⁵¹. Matter is valued only so far as it can receive form and enlarge the empire of ideas⁵². Aesthetic freedom depends on separating form from body and semblance from essence⁵³. Yet Schiller also grants that thought needs a body and that form can be realised only through matter⁵⁴. In his account form works on the shaper too: it gradually transforms man himself, turning leaps of joy into dance and feeling into song⁵⁵. Dante’s impression of form on matter has become, in Schiller, a moral and educational act by which man makes himself free.

Coleridge draws a distinction that recalls Raleigh’s. Form proceeds from within, while shape is superinduced from without⁵⁶. The idea that shapes a form is above form, as its essence and the universal in the individual⁵⁷. In dead organic things beauty depends on regularity of form, but in living things it requires more than regularity⁵⁸. Hugo defines beauty as form in its simplest aspect and most perfect symmetry⁵⁹. He defends verse as a form that encloses the idea and makes it more definite and complete without draining away nature or truth⁶⁰. Verse receives everything from the drama and encases thought in metre⁶¹. Goethe observes that the passage from formless matter to form comes hard to northern artists, who must study the proportions of the human figure⁶². Emerson reports Greenough’s theory of architecture, in which spaces and forms are arranged to suit function and site, with emphasis proportioned to importance⁶³. That brings the biological principle of structure fitted to use into the art of building.

The idea is finally extended to religion and civilization, where its value becomes contested. Penn grants that the world and our bodies are forms and that acts of devotion need forms, yet he calls forms shells and shadows⁶⁴. The outward form is necessary and is also always in danger of becoming empty. Mazzini criticizes Goethe’s world as above all a world of forms, weighted toward external representation⁶⁵. Taine, by contrast, treats form as generative. Civilizations proceed from a few spiritual forms, as crystals grow from simple geometrical forms⁶⁶. Taine’s image joins Faraday’s crystals to the Romantic conviction that spirit shapes the world.

Several questions remain open across these books. Is form a separate essence known by intellect, as in the Phaedo, or a principle that exists only in matter, as Dante’s teaching that the two were created together suggests? Is it the product of soul, as Emerson and Shelley hold? Or is it an inherited plan, as Darwin’s homologies suggest? Is beauty the triumph of form over matter or their balance, a tension Schiller never fully resolves? And are outward forms the vehicle of spirit or its husk? Descartes set the Schools’ forms aside, yet the idea came back in anatomy, poetics and the theory of culture. That return suggests the questions it raises are not easily abandoned.