Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I Part 52

...Our difference on "principle of improvement" and "power of adaptation" is too profound for discussion by letter. If I am wrong, I am quite blind to my error. If I am right, our difference will be got over only by your re-reading carefully and reflecting on my first four chapters. I supplicate you to read these again carefully. The so-called improvement of our Shorthorn cattle, pigeons, etc., does not presuppose or require any aboriginal "power of adaptation," or "principle of improvement;" it requires only diversified variability, and man to select or take advantage of those modifications which are useful to him; so under nature any slight modification which CHANCES to arise, and is useful to any creature, is selected or preserved in the struggle for life; any modification which is injurious is destroyed or rejected; any which is neither useful nor injurious will be left a fluctuating element. When you contrast natural selection and "improvement," you seem always to overlook (for I do not see how you can deny) that every step in the natural selection of each species implies improvement in that species in relation to its conditions of life. No modification can be selected without it be an improvement or advantage. Improvement implies, I suppose, each form obtaining many parts or organs, all excellently adapted for their functions. As each species is improved, and as the number of forms will have increased, if we look to the whole course of time, the organic condition of life for other forms will become more complex, and there will be a necessity for other forms to become improved, or they will be exterminated; and I can see no limit to this process of improvement, without the intervention of any other and direct principle of improvement. All this seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded.

If I have a second edition, I will reiterate "Natural Selection," and, as a general consequence, "Natural Improvement."

As you go, as far as you do, I begin strongly to think, judging from myself, that you will go much further. How slowly the older geologists admitted your grand views on existing geological causes of change!

If at any time you think I can answer any question, it is a real pleasure to me to write.

Yours affectionately, C. DARWIN.

CHARLES DARWIN TO J. MURRAY. Ilkley, Yorks.h.i.+re [1859].

My dear Sir,

I have received your kind note and the copy; I am infinitely pleased and proud at the appearance of my child.

I quite agree to all you propose about price. But you are really too generous about the, to me, scandalously heavy corrections. Are you not acting unfairly towards yourself? Would it not be better at least to share the 72 pounds 8 s.h.i.+llings? I shall be fully satisfied, for I had no business to send, though quite unintentionally and unexpectedly, such badly composed MS. to the printers.

Thank you for your kind offer to distribute the copies to my friends and a.s.sistors as soon as possible. Do not trouble yourself much about the foreigners, as Messrs. Williams and Norgate have most kindly offered to do their best, and they are accustomed to send to all parts of the world.

I will pay for my copies whenever you like. I am so glad that you were so good as to undertake the publication of my book.

My dear Sir, yours very sincerely, CHARLES DARWIN.

P.S.--Please do not forget to let me hear about two days before the copies are distributed.

I do not know when I shall leave this place, certainly not for several weeks. Whenever I am in London I will call on you.

CHAPTER 1.XIV. -- BY PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

ON THE RECEPTION OF THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.'

To the present generation, that is to say, the people a few years on the hither and thither side of thirty, the name of Charles Darwin stands alongside of those of Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday; and, like them, calls up the grand ideal of a searcher after truth and interpreter of Nature. They think of him who bore it as a rare combination of genius, industry, and unswerving veracity, who earned his place among the most famous men of the age by sheer native power, in the teeth of a gale of popular prejudice, and uncheered by a sign of favour or appreciation from the official fountains of honour; as one who in spite of an acute sensitiveness to praise and blame, and notwithstanding provocations which might have excused any outbreak, kept himself clear of all envy, hatred, and malice, nor dealt otherwise than fairly and justly with the unfairness and injustice which was showered upon him; while, to the end of his days, he was ready to listen with patience and respect to the most insignificant of reasonable objectors.

And with respect to that theory of the origin of the forms of life peopling our globe, with which Darwin's name is bound up as closely as that of Newton with the theory of gravitation, nothing seems to be further from the mind of the present generation than any attempt to smother it with ridicule or to crush it by vehemence of denunciation.

"The struggle for existence," and "Natural selection," have become household words and every-day conceptions. The reality and the importance of the natural processes on which Darwin founds his deductions are no more doubted than those of growth and multiplication; and, whether the full potency attributed to them is admitted or not, no one doubts their vast and far-reaching significance. Wherever the biological sciences are studied, the 'Origin of Species' lights the paths of the investigator; wherever they are taught it permeates the course of instruction. Nor has the influence of Darwinian ideas been less profound, beyond the realms of Biology. The oldest of all philosophies, that of Evolution, was bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism. But Darwin poured new life-blood into the ancient frame; the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate expression of the universal order of things than any of the schemes which have been accepted by the credulity and welcomed by the superst.i.tion of seventy later generations of men.

To any one who studies the signs of the times, the emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the att.i.tude of claimant to the throne of the world of thought, from the limbo of hated and, as many hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event of the nineteenth century. But the most effective weapons of the modern champions of Evolution were fabricated by Darwin; and the 'Origin of Species' has enlisted a formidable body of combatants, trained in the severe school of Physical Science, whose ears might have long remained deaf to the speculations of a priori philosophers.

I do not think any candid or instructed person will deny the truth of that which has just been a.s.serted. He may hate the very name of Evolution, and may deny its pretensions as vehemently as a Jacobite denied those of George the Second. But there it is--not only as solidly seated as the Hanoverian dynasty, but happily independent of Parliamentary sanction--and the dullest antagonists have come to see that they have to deal with an adversary whose bones are to be broken by no amount of bad words.

Even the theologians have almost ceased to pit the plain meaning of Genesis against the no less plain meaning of Nature. Their more candid, or more cautious, representatives have given up dealing with Evolution as if it were a d.a.m.nable heresy, and have taken refuge in one of two courses. Either they deny that Genesis was meant to teach scientific truth, and thus save the veracity of the record at the expense of its authority; or they expend their energies in devising the cruel ingenuities of the reconciler, and torture texts in the vain hope of making them confess the creed of Science. But when the peine forte et dure is over, the antique sincerity of the venerable sufferer always rea.s.serts itself. Genesis is honest to the core, and professes to be no more than it is, a repository of venerable traditions of unknown origin, claiming no scientific authority and possessing none.

As my pen finishes these pa.s.sages, I can but be amused to think what a terrible hubbub would have been made (in truth was made) about any similar expressions of opinion a quarter of a century ago. In fact, the contrast between the present condition of public opinion upon the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin's views are now held in the scientific world; between the acquiescence, or at least quiescence, of the theologians of the self-respecting order at the present day and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-9, when the new theory respecting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for doc.u.mentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my memories dreams. I have a great respect for the younger generation myself (they can write our lives, and ravel out all our follies, if they choose to take the trouble, by and by), and I should be glad to be a.s.sured that the feeling is reciprocal; but I am afraid that the story of our dealings with Darwin may prove a great hindrance to that veneration for our wisdom which I should like them to display. We have not even the excuse that, thirty years ago, Mr. Darwin was an obscure novice, who had no claims on our attention. On the contrary, his remarkable zoological and geological investigations had long given him an a.s.sured position among the most eminent and original investigators of the day; while his charming 'Voyage of a Naturalist' had justly earned him a wide-spread reputation among the general public. I doubt if there was any man then living who had a better right to expect that anything he might choose to say on such a question as the Origin of Species would be listened to with profound attention, and discussed with respect; and there was certainly no man whose personal character should have afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences.

Yet such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever my good fortune to know; and years had to pa.s.s away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation, ceased to be the most notable const.i.tuents of the majority of the mult.i.tudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press. I am loth to rake any of these ancient scandals from their well-deserved oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may seem overcharged to the present generation, and there is no piece justificative more apt for the purpose, or more worthy of such dishonour, than the article in the 'Quarterly Review' for July, 1860. (I was not aware when I wrote these pa.s.sages that the authors.h.i.+p of the article had been publicly acknowledged. Confession unaccompanied by penitence, however, affords no ground for mitigation of judgment; and the kindliness with which Mr. Darwin speaks of his a.s.sailant, Bishop Wilberforce (vol. ii.), is so striking an exemplification of his singular gentleness and modesty, that it rather increases one's indignation against the presumption of his critic.) Since Lord Brougham a.s.sailed Dr.

Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr.

Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men;" who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk of the "flowers and fruits" of the plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be "entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?" Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologic.u.m. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;" but, for all that, he devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory "contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator," and is "inconsistent with the fulness of his glory."

If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin of Species'

to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the 'Quarterly Review' article, unless, perhaps, the address of a Reverend Professor to the Dublin Geological Society might enter into compet.i.tion with it. But a large proportion of Mr. Darwin's critics had a lamentable resemblance to the 'Quarterly' reviewer, in so far as they lacked either the will, or the wit, to make themselves masters of his doctrine; hardly any possessed the knowledge required to follow him through the immense range of biological and geological science which the 'Origin' covered; while, too commonly, they had prejudiced the case on theological grounds, and, as seems to be inevitable when this happens, eked out lack of reason by superfluity of railing.

But it will be more pleasant and more profitable to consider those criticisms, which were acknowledged by writers of scientific authority, or which bore internal evidence of the greater or less competency and, often, of the good faith, of their authors. Restricting my survey to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, after the publication of the 'Origin,'

I find among such critics Louis Aga.s.siz ("The arguments presented by Darwin in favor of a universal derivation from one primary form of all the peculiarities existing now among living beings have not made the slightest impression on my mind.")

"Until the facts of Nature are shown to have been mistaken by those who have collected them, and that they have a different meaning from that now generally a.s.signed to them, I shall therefore consider the trans.m.u.tation theory as a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency."--Silliman's 'Journal,' July, 1860, pages 143, 154. Extract from the 3rd volume of 'Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.'); Murray, an excellent entomologist; Harvey, a botanist of considerable repute; and the author of an article in the 'Edinburgh Review,' all strongly adverse to Darwin. Pictet, the distinguished and widely learned paleontogist of Geneva, treats Mr. Darwin with a respect which forms a grateful contrast to the tone of some of the preceding writers, but consents to go with him only a very little way. ("I see no serious objections to the formation of varieties by natural selection in the existing world, and that, so far as earlier epochs are concerned, this law may be a.s.sumed to explain the origin of closely allied species, supposing for this purpose a very long period of time."

"With regard to simple varieties and closely allied species, I believe that Mr. Darwin's theory may explain many things, and throw a great light upon numerous questions."--'Sur l'Origine de l'Espece. Par Charles Darwin.' ('Archives des Sc. de la Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve,'

pages 242, 243, Mars 1860.) On the other hand, Lyell, up to that time a pillar of the anti-trans.m.u.tationists (who regarded him, ever afterwards, as Pallas Athene may have looked at Dian, after the Endymion affair), declared himself a Darwinian, though not without putting in a serious caveat. Nevertheless, he was a tower of strength, and his courageous stand for truth as against consistency, did him infinite honour. As evolutionists, sans phrase, I do not call to mind among the biologists more than Asa Gray, who fought the battle splendidly in the United States; Hooker, who was no less vigorous here; the present Sir John Lubbock and myself. Wallace was far away in the Malay Archipelago; but, apart from his direct share in the promulgation of the theory of natural selection, no enumeration of the influences at work, at the time I am speaking of, would be complete without the mention of his powerful essay 'On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species,' which was published in 1855. On reading it afresh, I have been astonished to recollect how small was the impression it made.

In France, the influence of Elie de Beaumont and of Flourens--the former of whom is said to have "d.a.m.ned himself to everlasting fame" by inventing the nickname of "la science moussante" for Evolutionism (One is reminded of the effect of another small academic epigram. The so-called vertebral theory of the skull is said to have been nipped in the bud in France by the whisper of an academician to his neighbour, that, in that case, one's head was a "vertebre pensante."),--to say nothing of the ill-will of other powerful members of the Inst.i.tut, produced for a long time the effect of a conspiracy of silence; and many years pa.s.sed before the Academy redeemed itself from the reproach that the name of Darwin was not to be found on the list of its members.

However, an accomplished writer, out of the range of academical influences, M. Laugel, gave an excellent and appreciative notice of the 'Origin' in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' Germany took time to consider; Bronn produced a slightly Bowdlerized translation of the 'Origin'; and 'Kladderadatsch' cut his jokes upon the ape origin of man; but I do not call to mind that any scientific notability declared himself publicly in 1860. (However, the man who stands next to Darwin in his influence on modern biologists, K.E. von Baer, wrote to me, in August 1860, expressing his general a.s.sent to evolutionist views. His phrase, "J'ai enonce les memes idees...que M. Darwin" (volume ii.) is shown by his subsequent writings to mean no more than this.) None of us dreamed that, in the course of a few years, the strength (and perhaps I may add the weakness) of "Darwinismus" would have its most extensive and most brilliant ill.u.s.trations in the land of learning. If a foreigner may presume to speculate on the cause of this curious interval of silence, I fancy it was that one moiety of the German biologists were orthodox at any price, and the other moiety as distinctly heterodox. The latter were evolutionists, a priori, already, and they must have felt the disgust natural to deductive philosophers at being offered an inductive and experimental foundation for a conviction which they had reached by a shorter cut. It is undoubtedly trying to learn that, though your conclusions may be all right, your reasons for them are all wrong, or, at any rate, insufficient.

On the whole, then, the supporters of Mr. Darwin's views in 1860 were numerically extremely insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that, if a general council of the Church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority.

And there is as little doubt that, if such a council gathered now, the decree would be of an exactly contrary nature. It would indicate a lack of sense, as well as of modesty, to ascribe to the men of that generation less capacity or less honesty than their successors possess.

What, then, are the causes which led instructed and fair-judging men of that day to arrive at a judgment so different from that which seems just and fair to those who follow them? That is really one of the most interesting of all questions connected with the history of science, and I shall try to answer it. I am afraid that in order to do so I must run the risk of appearing egotistical. However, if I tell my own story it is only because I know it better than that of other people.

I think I must have read the 'Vestiges' before I left England in 1846; but, if I did, the book made very little impression upon me, and I was not brought into serious contact with the 'Species' question until after 1850. At that time, I had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony, which had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth, with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbia.s.sed in respect of any doctrine which presented itself, if it professed to be based on purely philosophical and scientific reasoning. It seemed to me then (as it does now) that "creation," in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in imagining that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some pre-existent Being.

Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism; and, given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of reasonable foundation. I had not then, and I have not now, the smallest a priori objection to raise to the account of the creation of animals and plants given in 'Paradise Lost,' in which Milton so vividly embodies the natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to say that it is untrue because it is impossible. I confine myself to what must be regarded as a modest and reasonable request for some particle of evidence that the existing species of animals and plants did originate in that way, as a condition of my belief in a statement which appears to me to be highly improbable.

And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to give to the evolutionists of 1851-8. Within the ranks of the biologists, at that time, I met with n.o.body, except Dr. Grant, of University College, who had a word to say for Evolution--and his advocacy was not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks, the only person known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was, at the same time, a thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friends.h.i.+p which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt ill.u.s.tration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of trans.m.u.tation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the trans.m.u.tation a.s.sumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable.

In those days I had never even heard of Trevira.n.u.s' 'Biologie.' However, I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the 'Vestiges' with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical att.i.tude. As for the 'Vestiges,' I confess that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I wrote on the 'Vestiges' while under that influence.

With respect to the 'Philosophie Zoologique,' it is no reproach to Lamarck to say that the discussion of the Species question in that work, whatever might be said for it in 1809, was miserably below the level of the knowledge of half a century later. In that interval of time the elucidation of the structure of the lower animals and plants had given rise to wholly new conceptions of their relations; histology and embryology, in the modern sense, had been created; physiology had been reconst.i.tuted; the facts of distribution, geological and geographical, had been prodigiously multiplied and reduced to order. To any biologist whose studies had carried him beyond mere species-mongering in 1850, one-half of Lamarck's arguments were obsolete and the other half erroneous, or defective, in virtue of omitting to deal with the various cla.s.ses of evidence which had been brought to light since his time.

Moreover his one suggestion as to the cause of the gradual modification of species--effort excited by change of conditions--was, on the face of it, inapplicable to the whole vegetable world. I do not think that any impartial judge who reads the 'Philosophie Zoologique' now, and who afterwards takes up Lyell's trenchant and effectual criticism (published as far back as 1830), will be disposed to allot to Lamarck a much higher place in the establishment of biological evolution than that which Bacon a.s.signs to himself in relation to physical science generally,--buccinator tantum. (Erasmus Darwin first promulgated Lamarck's fundamental conceptions, and, with greater logical consistency, he had applied them to plants. But the advocates of his claims have failed to show that he, in any respect, antic.i.p.ated the central idea of the 'Origin of Species.')

But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as in the venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious conviction that Evolution, after all, would turn out true. I have recently read afresh the first edition of the 'Principles of Geology'; and when I consider that this remarkable book had been nearly thirty years in everybody's hands, and that it brings home to any reader of ordinary intelligence a great principle and a great fact--the principle, that the past must be explained by the present, unless good cause be shown to the contrary; and the fact, that, so far as our knowledge of the past history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be shown (The same principle and the same fact guide the result from all sound historical investigation. Grote's 'History of Greece' is a product of the same intellectual movement as Lyell's 'Principles.')--I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief agent for smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world.

The origin of a new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully eliminated from sober geological speculation.

In fact, no one was better aware of this than Lyell himself. (Lyell, with perfect right, claims this position for himself. He speaks of having "advocated a law of continuity even in the organic world, so far as possible without adopting Lamarck's theory of trans.m.u.tation"...)

"But while I taught that as often as certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it remained for Darwin to acc.u.mulate proof that there is no break between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work of evolution, and not of special creation...

"I had certainly prepared the way in this country, in six editions of my work before the 'Vestiges of Creation' appeared in 1842 [1844], for the reception of Darwin's gradual and insensible evolution of species."--('Life and Letters,' Letter to Haeckel, volume ii. page 436.

November 23, 1868.) If one reads any of the earlier editions of the 'Principles' carefully (especially by the light of the interesting series of letters recently published by Sir Charles Lyell's biographer), it is easy to see that, with all his energetic opposition to Lamarck, on the one hand, and to the ideal quasi-progressionism of Aga.s.siz, on the other, Lyell, in his own mind, was strongly disposed to account for the origination of all past and present species of living things by natural causes. But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of creation for a natural process which he imagined to be incomprehensible.

In a letter addressed to Mantell (dated March 2, 1827), Lyell speaks of having just read Lamarck; he expresses his delight at Lamarck's theories, and his personal freedom from any objection based on theological grounds. And though he is evidently alarmed at the pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine, he observes:--

"But, after all, what changes species may really undergo! How impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line, beyond which some of the so-called extinct species have never pa.s.sed into recent ones."

Again, the following remarkable pa.s.sage occurs in the postscript of a letter addressed to Sir John Herschel in 1836:--

"In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention of intermediate causes. I left this rather to be inferred, not thinking it worth while to offend a certain cla.s.s of persons by embodying in words what would only be a speculation." (In the same sense, see the letter to Whewell, March 7, 1837, volume ii., page 5):--