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What a formidable question, that of “origins.” Or rather a strange pursuit that is commonly thought to be inscribed from time immemorial in the depths of the human soul, like a quest for meaning equally satisfied by age-old myths, be they religious or not, and by the demands of Reason. Do we speak of an anthropological constant? This imperious need to go back to the root of things would arise from deep inside the human psyche, like a will to power of mankind who seeks to place itself in a spatio-temporal continuum to ward off the fear of death. “Origins are initiatives, whose example strengthens us” [1: 177]. In short, anything is better than insignificance. The “mystery” surrounding the Origins, as it is sometimes said, would have arisen “with the dawn of thought” at a certain point in our evolution. As Andre Leroi-Gourhan [2: 9–10] explains, Neanderthal preceded the prehistorian who “delve[s] into the recesses of the earth like a child taking a toy to pieces.” Whatever the distance that separates them, he continues, they are close in spirit: “No great effort is required to discern the same feelings, intact though still as vague, beneath the scientific shell of today’s scholar.” And it doesn’t matter that, in this case, the true “beginning” evades us, that it may sought in “vain”, that the so-called historical sciences, or more exactly the “palaetiological” sciences, are incapable of reaching this goal [3: 8]. To grasp the fundamental origin of phenomena in general is only an ideal. It is in a sense a target for the mind. There remains the drive, the libido sciendi, which, on its own, creates a stir and is satisfied. As the physicist Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond claims [4: 369]: “The interest in science cannot be reduced to the petty aspirations for objective knowledge and the security it offers. There is in the thirst for knowledge [. . . ] the expression of real passions and deepseated fantasies. When cosmology addresses the question of the origin of the universe, biology the origin of life, anthropology the origin of Man, science only reformulates in its own way the fundamental questionings of mankind, the quest for its identity, using all the intellectual means at its disposal: science meets the metaphysical and the mystical.” Since the 19th century, although popular science has appealed to human emotion to the point of mixing up biblical narrative and modern rationalism based on Karl Popper’s principle of falsification, the history of science has no hold on methodological psychologism. Subjectivity, what has sometimes been

History and semantics of origins: Between nature, artifice and beliefs (18th–19thcentury)

History and semantics of origins: Between nature, artifice and beliefs (18^th–19^thcentury)