Inscape and instress are complementary and enigmatic concepts about individuality and uniqueness derived by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.
[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity.
Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.
Tolkien writes, The idea is strongly embraced by the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton who admired both Scotus and Hopkins.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell'sBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
[6] Hopkins's poems which delineate inscape and instress typically celebrate how an immutable Deity continually creates and recreates a living world of infinite variety and change.
Similar to Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance,[10] Hopkins's vision of the physical world in his poem “Pied Beauty” is one of “perpetual motion.” For Hopkins, the responsibility of establishing and maintaining order within the physical world does not lie with the individual observer as Pater maintained, but rather with the eternal Creator himself.
[9] In a highly relevant way, this paradox echoes that of modern-day naturalists who celebrate how the immutable building blocks of DNA continually combine and recombine to produce a living world of infinite variety and change.