Illustration of Johann Gottfried Herder watching bees at the edge of a honeycomb beside a crystal

What a spider can do and a crystal need never learn

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a German writer and philosopher. In his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, a question about skill brings together three rather different builders. A bee makes comb, a spider spins a web, and a crystal grows. It is the crystal that seems to have the surest touch. What can skill mean here, if the most accomplished builder of the three never has to learn how to build?

Three activities in one sentence

Herder has the bee build and the spider weave. Both are words we might use of human work. For the crystal he chooses a different verb, one that suggests parts shooting together as they grow. There is no finished creature reaching out for the materials from which it will make something apart from itself. A honeycomb is the work of a bee. With a crystal, the structure that has come into being and the body doing the growing are one and the same. Once we see that difference, the comparison reads rather less like a simple ranking of skills.

A crystal grows together more deftly and regularly than a bee builds or a spider weaves.

– Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, p. 163.[1]

Where it is possible to succeed, it is possible to go wrong

In the sentences that follow, Herder turns to the tools and limbs an animal uses. They must work together for a particular purpose, and that coordination can be disturbed. A viewer might look at an almost perfectly regular structure and award its maker the highest place. Herder quietly changes the measure. To have a greater range of means is also to have more opportunities to go astray. For the animal, uncertainty is the price of being able to do something. The crystal teaches Herder something about the lives of animals precisely because there is no sense in which a crystal can be clumsy.