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EVOLUTION
SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
BY
ARTHUR M. LEWIS
THIRD EDITION
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1908
CONTENTS
Page
I THALES TO LINNAEUS 7
II LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 24
III DARWIN’S “NATURAL SELECTION” 38
IV WEISMANN’S THEORY OF HEREDITY 60
V DE VRIES’ “MUTATION” 81
VI KROPOTKIN’S “MUTUAL AID” 97
VII A REPLY TO HAECKEL 115
VIII SPENCER’S “SOCIAL ORGANISM” 133
IX SPENCER’S INDIVIDUALISM 149
X CIVILIZATION--WARD AND DIETZGEN 168
PREFACE.
The contents of this volume consist of the first ten lectures of the
thirty-five in the Winter course of 1907–08. They were delivered in
the Garrick Theater, Chicago, on Sunday mornings to crowded houses.
On several occasions half as many people were turned away as managed
to get in. If these lectures meet with as warm a reception when read
as they did when heard, I shall be more than satisfied. For a fuller
discussion of the Greek period, briefly dealt with in the first
lecture, see Edward Clodd’s “Pioneers of Evolution” to which work the
early part of this lecture is greatly indebted.
Every lecture proceeds on the assumption, that a knowledge of
the natural sciences, and especially the great revolutionizing
generalizations which they have revealed, is indispensable to a modern
education.
This position is by no means new. It pervades the classic literature of
Socialism throughout. Liebknecht, speaking of Marx and himself says:
“Soon we were on the field of Natural Science, and Marx ridiculed
the victorious reaction in Europe that fancied it had smothered the
revolution and did not suspect that Natural Science was preparing a
new revolution.”
The only thing I have succeeded in doing which is at all new, is
presenting these so-called heavy subjects in a way that attracts and
retains a large and enthusiastic audience Sunday after Sunday eight
months of the year.
These lectures, nothwithstanding their phenomenal success, have
aroused some opposition, in certain quarters among Socialists. This
opposition arises almost wholly from the fact that the Socialists in
question have yet to learn what their own standard literature contains.
When they make that discovery they will be obliged to do one of two
things, reject the Socialist philosophy or cease opposing its public
presentation.
A second thought will show that they may do neither. There is a type of
brain the specimens of which are very numerous, which seems to possess
the faculty of keeping different kinds of knowledge and contradictory
ideas, in separate, water-tight compartments. Thus, as these ideas
never come together there is no collision.
The most conspicuous example of this is the man who accepts and openly
proclaims the truth of the materialistic conception of history--the
theory that, among other things, explains the origin, functions, and
changes of religion, just as it does those of law--yet the very man
who boasts of his concurrence in this epoch-making theory, using one
lobe of his brain, will, while using the other lobe, and with still
greater fervency, maintain that the Socialist philosophy has nothing
to do with religion at all, but is an “economic” question only. The
left lobe knows not what the right lobe is doing. Dietzgen described
these Comrades as “dangerous muddle-heads.” He might have omitted the
adjective. A brain of this order renders its possessor harmless.
These well-meaning friends have offered a great deal of advice as to
how to conduct our meeting without “driving people away.” Yet strangely
enough our audience grew by leaps and bounds, until from seventy-five
at the first lecture we are now crowding and often overcrowding one
of the largest and finest theaters inside the loop. Meanwhile they
followed their own advice and saw what was at the beginning a fine
audience of five hundred grow less and less until it is less than fifty
and sometimes falls below thirty. This does not seem to justify the cry
that the working class is hungering for Christian Socialism.
Further volumes of these lectures will carry the theories of Socialism
into yet other fields of science and philosophy.
In conclusion let me ask a certain type of correspondents to save my
time and their own. They say they agree with my views entirely; there
is no question but I am right. And the lectures would be in place
if delivered before university men. But workingmen (my top-lofty
correspondents not included of course) have so many ignorant prejudices
that fearless scientific teaching is not acceptable to them. The size
of my audience is sufficient disproof of the last statement. As to
the rest, it is just the existence of ignorant prejudices that makes
the fearless teaching of science necessary. Again, I have yet to
be convinced that there is any kind of knowledge which is good for
university men, but unfit for workingmen. Moreover, I positively refuse
to have one kind of knowledge for myself, and another to give out to
my audience. This is the fundamental principle of priestcraft, and the
working class has had far too much of it already.
On this ground--that there is nothing higher than reality, that
Socialism is in harmony with all reality and that in the end reality
must triumph--the future lectures of these courses will stand or fall.
=Arthur M. Lewis.=
Chicago, Dec. 27, ’07.
EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
I.
THALES TO LINNAEUS.
“Early ideas,” says Herbert Spencer, “are usually vague adumbrations
of the truth,” and however numerous may be the exceptions, this was
undoubtedly the case with the evolutionary speculations of the ancient
Greeks. The greatness of that remarkable republic finds one of its most
striking manifestations in the fact that so many great modern ideas
trace their ancestry back to Greece. Sir Henry Maine, the historical
jurist, said that, “except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves
that is not Greek in its origin.” Compared with her dreamy oriental
neighbors, Greece shone like a meteor in a moonless night. As Professor
Burnet says, “They left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless
task of describing what was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked
instead what all things really are now,” while the Oriental shrunk from
the search after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks
“on each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven.”
The Greeks very largely discarded the theological mind, peopled with
its pious phantasms, and sought to probe into the nature of the
material universe. This is why we discover a fairly distinct, and
sometimes startlingly clear “adumbration” of the theory of evolution
running like a chain of gold through the immortal fragments of their
greatest thinkers.
What is it that really is, and what that only seems to be? What
is real, and what is only apparent? This is the theme which Greek
philosophy has in common with modern thought, and this is why the
remnants of Greek literature are so precious in the twentieth century.
Thales, of Miletus, in Asia Minor, is conceded to have been the founder
of Greek philosophy. “He asserted water to be the principle of all
things,” says Diogenes Laertius, and he regarded all life as coming
from water, a position by no means foreign to modern science.
Anaximander, also a Milesian and a younger contemporary of Thales, who
like him flourished between 500 and 600 B. C., said that the material
cause of all things was the Infinite. “It is neither water nor any
other of what are now called the elements, but a substance different
from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the
worlds within them.” “Man,” he boldly asserts, “is like another animal,
namely, a fish, in the beginning,” a shrewd guess which is now an
established fact.
Anaximenes, the third and last of the Milesian philosophers, while
following his predecessors closely in time, disagreed with them as
to the raw material of the universe. He declares it to be air which,
“when it is dilated so as to be rarer becomes fire while winds, on the
other hand, are condensed air, Cloud is formed from air by ‘felting’
and this, still further condensed, becomes water. Water, condensed
still more, turns to earth; and when condensed as much as it can be, to
stones.” All of which proves that Anaximenes had a very fertile brain.
Herakleitos, one of the greatest of all Greek thinkers, lived for a
time at Ephesus and expressed the following forceful opinion of his
fellow citizens: “The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves,
every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless youths; for
they have cast out Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying: ‘We
will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be
so elsewhere and among others.’” According to him everything comes
from and returns to fire and “all things are in a state of flux like
a river.” Here is the intellectual ancestor of Hegel with his great
saying. “Nothing is, everything is becoming.” Herakleitos sagaciously
observed: “You cannot step twice into the same rivers, for fresh waters
are ever flowing in upon you.”
Parmenides, born at Elea about 515 B. C., was poet and philosopher
both, and insisted in his hexameter verse that the universe is a unity,
which neither came out of nothing, nor could, in any degree, pass away,
thus anticipating by over 2,000 years Lavoisier’s doctrine of the
permanence of matter.
Empedocles, of Akragas in Sicily, about the same time, stated this
great truth with still greater force and clearness: “Fools!--for they
have no far-reaching thoughts--who deem that what before was not,
comes into being or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.
For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is, and it
is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish; for it will
always be, wherever one may keep putting it.” He also endeavored to
combine and reconcile the ideas of some of his predecessors, teaching
that all things come from four roots--water, air, fire and earth.
Anaxagoras, born about 500 B. C., was the first Greek to suffer for
science. He was brought to trial for asserting the sun to be a red hot
stone, and it would have probably gone hard with him had not the mighty
Pericles been his friend. If the sun was merely a fiery ball, what
became of the religion founded on the worship of Apollo?
Nearly a half a century earlier Xenophanes, of Colophon, had ventilated
ideas much more obnoxious to the priests. He had done for his age what
Feuerbach did to the Nineteenth century--he had explained the origin of
the gods by Anthropomorphism. Said he: “If oxen or lions had hands, and
could paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, horses
would paint the forms of the gods like horses and oxen like oxen. Each
would represent them with bodies according to the form of each. So the
Ethiopians make their gods black and snubnosed; the Thracians give
theirs red hair and blue eyes.” Had Xenophanes lived at Athens, where a
religious revival had just taken place, he would have shared the fate
which later overtook the impious Socrates. Luckily for Xenophanes,
in the colony where he lived “the gods were left to take care of
themselves.” Anaxagoras was the first to determine what causes the
eclipses and the illumination of the moon:--“The moon has not a light
of her own but gets it from the sun. The moon is eclipsed by the earth
screening the sun’s light from it. The sun is eclipsed at the new moon,
when the moon screens it from us.”
The Pythagoreans who must be distinguished from the medicine man
Pythagoras, from whom they only take their name indirectly, and not
as disciples, believed the reality of the universe was to be found in
numbers. They were deceived into this absurdity by the exactness of
mathematical conclusions. This was excusable among the Greeks to whom
arithmetical combinations were as wonderful as electrical phenomena are
to us, but its revival in our day by astrologers and theosophists has
no such justification.
Socrates, born about 470 B. C., at Athens, is described as “pug-nosed,
thick-lipped, big-bellied and bulging-eyed”--the very opposite of the
Greek ideal of beauty. He believed that knowledge itself would bring
virtue, and sought to discover the true ground of knowledge. His search
brought him into conflict with the religious bigotry of his day and he
was finally sentenced to death and died from drinking hemlock in 399
B. C. He wrote nothing and his work is preserved mainly through his
influence on Plato.
Leukippos and Demokritos are linked together through their statements
of the atomic theory, made more than twenty centuries before Dalton.
They placed the permanent reality of things in numberless atoms, of
which Leukippos said “there are an infinite number of them, and they
are invisible owing to the smallness of their bulk.”
Plato we shall pass by; his metaphysical doctrine of ideas contributed
little of value to the solution of the riddle of the universe.
We now come to the great Stagirite, Aristotle, founder of the
experimental school and father of natural history. Born in 384 B. C.,
he entered the Academy under Plato when a boy of eighteen. When he was
thirty-six Plato died, and Aristotle then left Athens. At forty-one he
became the teacher of Alexander the Great. He was the greatest of all
the Greeks, and his studies took a wider range than had been embraced
by any previous thinker.
Stageira, where he spent his boyhood, was on the Strynomid gulf, and
here he observed the variations and gradations between marine plants
and animals. It is an evidence of his keen insight that he classified
the sponge as an animal. Compare this with Agassiz, the opponent
of Darwinism, who, in the 19th century, declared the sponge to be a
vegetable.
Aristotle insisted on observation and experience as the foundation of
knowledge. “We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but
must prove its application to each fact. For it is in facts we must
seek general principles, and these must always accord with facts.” He
repudiated the idea of purpose in nature, saying, “Jupiter rains not
that corn may be increased, but from necessity.” He came very near Von
Mohl’s protoplasm when he said, “Germs should have been first produced,
and not immediately animals; and that soft mass which first subsisted
was the germ.”
Passing over the much misrepresented Epicurus we come two centuries
later to the illustrious Roman poet philosopher, Lucretius. In this
last century preceeding the Christian era, Greece had fallen from her
high estate and become a Roman province. But while Rome had annexed
Greece, Greek learning had conquered the Roman mind.
Lucretius in his poem, “The System of Nature,” expounds, with
great force, the atomic theory of his Greek forerunners. The first
anthropologist, he comes so near to Spencer and Tylor that his ideas,
and sometimes even his sentences smack of the 19th century. “The
past history of man” he asserts, “lies in no heroic or golden age,
but in one struggle out of savagery.” Of the origin of language he
says, “Nature impelled them to utter the various sounds of the tongue,
and use struck out the names of things.” Of the early struggles of
primitive men he says, “Man’s first arms were hands, nails and teeth
and stones and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire,
as soon as they had become known. Afterward the force of iron and
copper was discovered, and the use of copper was known before that
of iron, as its nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater
quantity. With copper they would labor the soil of the earth and stir
up the billows of war. Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained
ground and the make of the copper sickle became a byword.” The name
of Lucretius closes the long line of the evolutionary pioneers of the
ancient world. There the golden vein ceases so far as thinking is
concerned, not to reappear until many centuries have passed.
With the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and the rise to power of
Christianity, learning was driven from Europe and found refuge among
the Arabians. This brings us to the dark or middle ages. It is in the
interpretation of the phenomena of this period, that bourgeois free
thinkers like Clodd and Draper break down. They tacitly assume that
in Europe evolution was suspended for over a thousand years; and all
because of the Christian church. They fail to recognize that deeper
cause, the medieval form of wealth production, which gave the church
its power to repress learning in the interest of the lords of the
land, among which the church herself was greatest; owning as she did
one-third of the soil of Europe.
The bourgeois radical cannot perceive that during this period social
processes were being gradually transformed and that an economic
foundation was being laid that would make possible the renaissance
and put science in an impregnable position, and make the progressive
acceptance of evolution inevitable. Engels says: “The Middle Ages were
reckoned as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of
barbarism. The great advances of the Middle Ages--the broadening of
European learning, the bringing into existence of great nations, which
arose, one after the other, and finally the enormous technical advances
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--all this no one saw”.
But it cannot be denied that this was a terrible period for any thinker
who had the misfortune to be born in it. All that was great and noble
in the thought of Greece and Rome was rigorously suppressed. The
“perfecting principle” of Aristotle was wrested to theological uses.
An emaciated form of his philosophy, and a literal interpretation of
the scriptures, constituted the only permissible studies. Outside this
dilution of Aristotle, the only thing in Greek thought which appealed
to the medieval mind was the Pythagorean mystical use of numbers. The
conclusions reached by that method were truly remarkable, especially
when we remember that they engaged such notable men as Augustine, the
celebrated Bishop of Hippo.
These are examples: Because there are three persons in the trinity,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three orders in the church, bishops
priests and deacons; three degrees of attainment, light, purity and
knowledge; three virtues, faith, hope and charity, and three eyes in
a honeybee; therefore, there can only be three colors, red, yellow
and blue. Because there were seven churches in the apocalypse, seven
golden candlesticks, seven cardinal virtues, seven deadly sins and
seven sacraments; therefore, there could only be seven planets and
seven metals. Because there were seventy-two disciples and seventy-two
interpreters of the old testament and seventy-two mystical names of
God; therefore there must be no more and no less than seventy-two
joints in the human body.
During this period, European cities had no paving or lighting, and
one could not step from a doorway in London or Paris without plunging
ankle deep in mud. They had practically no drainage and they were,
at frequent intervals devastated by the plague. But the cities of
Andalusia, built and governed by the Moors in Spain, were drained,
well lighted and solidly paved. They had public libraries and public
schools. From their medical colleges Europe obtained the only doctors
it had.
In the cities of Christian Europe these enlightened people were treated
like dogs, while in their wonderful cities, visiting Christians were
met with a hospitality and broad toleration wholly exceptional in the
middle ages.
In Europe, even toward the close of this period, broad, scientific
thinking was impossible. Nicholas Copernicus, in the 16th century,
afraid of the faggot, carried as a secret locked in his own bosom,
that heliocentric theory which is the foundation of modern astronomy.
His great disciple Giordano Bruno, for expounding that theory with
rare ability, after it was revealed by the great Prussian, was hunted
through Europe like a wild animal and finally burned at the stake.
For the same reason, the third person in the trinity of the 16th
century’s greatest thinkers, Galileo, was harassed and humiliated, and
at last died a prisoner in his own house.
But all through this period, despite its intellectual stagnation,
economic evolution proceeded, laying the foundation for a new
intellectual superstructure. That evolution manifested itself chiefly
in the rise and growth of a trading class. To the existence of such
a class in its society, the Arabians owed their greater liberality,
and scientific spirit. When Vasca Da Gama sailed down the west coast
of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean,
trusting to chance for the outcome of his voyage, he found the Arabians
directing their vessels by a strange instrument which we now call the
mariner’s compass.
The merchants of Genoa and of Spain discovered that orthodox
superstitions did not help but did seriously injure, their commerce. As
captains for their ships they preferred for purely economic reasons,
men who had become infected with the ideas of navigation of the pagan
Arabians, to men who took their ideas of the universe from the city
bishop or the village priest and kept their ships close to land,
afraid lest they should sail off the edge of the world, or into that
great hole where the angels put the sun at night, after they had
finished rolling it across the sky.
It was the growth and final triumph of this trading class, with
economic interests and a mode of wealth production that demanded the
liberation of science, that abolished the thumbscrew and the stake.
Voltaire, Rousseau, and the encyclopaedists were obnoxious to the
feudal regime, lay and clerical, because they were the prophets and
mouthpieces of the rising bourgeoisie.
This class, by the emancipation of science, performed a lasting
service to the human race. The society in which it predominated, at
once produced a prolific crop of great thinkers. Sweden had Linnaeus,
England had Lyell, Germany had Goethe; but the palm fell to France. In
the revolution France had suppressed the Sorbonne, that theological
institution which had always shown itself the official and bitter enemy
of science, and she soon after equipped scientific expeditions, which
gave her the greatest thinkers of that day--Cuvier, St. Hilaire, and,
most illustrious of all that courageous pioneer of modern evolution,
Jean Lamarck.
The position of the capitalist class of a hundred years ago was very
different from that of today. Then it was the harbinger of progress;
now it is the stronghold of reaction. Its interests then were very
different from its interests now. Then it was called upon by destiny to
steer society into new waters; now destiny bids it, since its task is
done, to step aside that a new hand may grip the wheel. Then it fought
a social order which had had its day, now it is in the midst of social
forces which it cannot administer. That was its lusty youth; this is
its doddering old age.
When the Bourgeoisie released science from feudal chains, it let loose
a force that carried it to victory, but, at that moment, it planted the
germs of its own future destruction. Today it reverses its attitude
and would fain suppress science or at least prevent its reaching
the proletarian brain. But alas, it is in the grip of evolutionary
processes of which it is merely a part, and it is bound, more securely
than Prometheus to the rock, to a mode of production which makes the
education of the proletariat a relentless necessity. The nation which
keeps its working class in semi-feudal darkness is ground to pieces by
the industrial competition of its neighbors--it goes to the wall in the
struggle for existence. Thus, in the language of Marx, it is obliged
by present necessity to dig its own future grave.
The same inscrutable power that called it forth to lead society to a
new triumph, now relegates it to the rear and enthrones in its place a
new class, a propertyless working class, the child of the wage system,
destined to emancipate itself and, by the same stroke, the whole human
race. If this be not the mission of the working class, as an instrument
of social evolution, the press and platform of the Socialist movement
is a useless dissipation of energy. But this is precisely what Marx
proved when he laid the foundation of the Socialist philosophy.
Every year brings its quota of evidence that the working class is
gathering the political capacity and the social intelligence necessary
to equip it for this tremendous task.
Norway grew weary of Swedish dominance and decided to achieve national
independence. At once the Swedish Bourgeoisie began to gird up its
loins for a bloody dynastic war. The pampered sons of its aristocracy,
unable to do anything useful, were to have glory thrust upon them,
commanding, from the rear, regiments of Swedish workers to slaughter
and be slaughtered by their exploited Norwegian brothers. But while
these sinister preparations were in full blast, a vast army of
Norwegians crossed the boundary line into Sweden and met a Swedish army
of the same proportions. There was no blood-shedding for both armies
were unarmed. In place of bayonets and needle guns they had their wives
and children. They fraternized; they clasped hands; they tossed each
other’s babies in their arms. From that moment war was impossible. They
carried neither the national banner of Sweden nor of Norway. Over both
those great armies, now become one, singing their songs of working
class solidarity, there floated the red flag of the social revolution.
II.
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK.
For a hundred years the word “progress” has been a word to conjure
with. No proposal is too reactionary to be put forward in its name
and the self-admitted conservative explains that he only wishes to
“conserve” the good things which progress has bestowed upon us. It has
been invoked on all sides of all questions, and no superstition was so
ancient or absurd, no theory so exploded, but it could be revived under
a new name and presented to the world as an infallible sign of the
progress of the age.
But during the last century men have arisen, who were dissatisfied
with a term that covered everything and meant nothing, and who were
determined to find out what constituted progress and whether it had any
existence in the world of reality. More has been accomplished in this
respect during that century than in all the combined previous existence
of the human race. The conception or idea of progress is the mental
reflection of the process of evolution, which operates everywhere
to the remotest niche or cranny in the material universe. The only
difference between progress and evolution is that evolution is a more
inclusive term, including as it does phenomena which we should call
retrogressive.
The men who laid the foundations of modern knowledge, and imparted
sense and force to hitherto meaningless terms, were they who threw
aside theological phantasms and metaphysical speculations and set
themselves the task of gathering the facts and ascertaining the laws of
the real--the material--world. This is the method of science, and it is
to this method that we owe all our knowledge of world problems.
For more than a thousand years this method was practically suspended.
Any attempt, during that period, to make use of it was rigorously
suppressed, except among the pagan Arabians. Biological science stood
still, scarcely even marking time. Says Packard “After Aristotle, no
epoch-making zoologist arose until Linnaeus was born,” a yawning chasm
of thirteen hundred years.
Linnaeus, born 1707, in Sweden, was the greatest naturalist of his time
and might have done greater things for evolutionary ideas had it not
been for the theological influences which restrained him. But, hindered
as he was, he accomplished enough to entitle him to a place among the
immortals. “He found botany a chaos,” says Prof. Thatcher, “and left it
a unity.” His contribution to science consists mainly in his system of
classification and nomenclature. Before Linnaeus nobody had been able,
though many had tried, to group and name animal and vegetable forms in
such a manner as to rescue them from utter confusion. This is precisely
what Linnaeus did when, by a happy idea, he adopted what is called the
“binary nomenclature.”
This great advance was by no means far-fetched; it is simply an
application of the double naming everywhere in use, as in the case of
Tom Smith, Fred Smith, James Smith, in which Smith is used to denote
the general or family name and Fred or Tom the particular or personal.
In the application of this system to species, Linnaeus reversed the
order as we do when we enter the names of persons on an alphabetical
list, as Smith, Fred and Smith, James. As illustrations we will take
the two cases, one from the animal and one from the plant world,
selected by Haeckel for the same purpose. The generic name for cat is
Felis. The common cat is Felis domestica; the wildcat, Felis catus;
the panther, Felis pardus; the jaguar, Felis onca; the tiger, Felis
tigris; the lion, Felis leo. All these second names are the names of
the six species of the one genus--Felis. As an example in botany take
the genus pine. According to Linnaeus the pine is Pinus abies; the fir,
Pinus picea; the larch, Pinus larix; the Italian pine, Pinus pinea;
the Siberian stone pine Pinus cembra; the knee timber, Pinus mughus;
the common pine, Pinus silvestris. The seven second names apply to the
seven species of the genus Pinus.
But this is not all. Besides grouping the species into genera, Linnaeus
classified certain genera as belonging to the same “order.” Again he
arranged these “orders” in “classes,” all these classes belonged to one
of the two great “kingdoms,” vegetable and animal.
Not only was all this of great practical value but its theoretical
influence has been incalculable. Linnaeus never saw, and probably would
not have dared to proclaim if he had, that the resemblances which made
his grouping possible, indicated a relationship based on descent from
common ancestors. This was left for men of greater penetration and
courage living in a less theological age. Prelates who smiled on the
obscene debaucheries of Louis the XV. had Linnaeus’ writings prohibited
from papal states, because they proved the existence of sex in plants.
Linnaeus not only proved sex in plants but made it the foundation of
his classification. He also reminds us that plants were known to be of
both sexes by oriental people in early days. Living as they did on the
fruit of the date-palms they found it necessary to plant male trees
among the females. Their enemies in war time struck a terrible blow
when they cut down the male trees, thereby reducing them to famine.
Sometimes the inhabitants themselves destroyed the male trees during
impending invasion, so that the enemy should find no sustenance in
their country; a war measure similar to that of Russians who burned
Moscow in the face of Napoleon.
In the same year that Sweden produced Linnaeus, France gave birth
to Buffon. Rich and independent, he chose to devote a long life to
the study of natural history. He had remarkable powers of research
and displayed genius in presenting the results of his investigation.
But alas! he had less courage than Linnaeus and he lived nearer
that terrible enemy of eighteenth century science, the theological
department of the University of Paris--the dreaded Sorbonne.
As long as he confined himself to the mere description of animals he
was a pet of the church, which seems to have pleased him, but when he
began to draw evolutionary conclusions of real philosophical import and
value, the Sorbonne at once opened its batteries. On these occasions
Buffon’s retreat was prompt and unprotesting. It might be remembered
as some mitigation of his cowardice that while the reign of the stake
and faggot did not extend into the 18th century and there was no danger
of the fate of the fearless Bruno, yet so strong was religious bigotry
even in this period that Rousseau was hunted out of France, his books
burned by the public executioner, and Diderot went to jail. “Hardly a
single man of letters of that time escaped arbitrary imprisonment,”
says John Morley in his “Rousseau.”
This was all very repugnant to the pride and vanity of Buffon and led
him to adopt a style of writing much in vogue a century earlier when
the theological hand was heavy as death. This method was to put forward
the new idea as a heresy or a mere fancy, explain it, and then proceed
with great show of earnestness to demolish it in favor of the orthodox
view. This method succeeded admirably until it broke through the thick
skulls of religious bigots that the case presented for the “heresy” was
more convincing than the pretended reply.
A fine example of this appears in the fourth volume of Buffon’s
“Natural History.” “If we once admit” says he, “that the ass belongs to
the horse family, and that it only differs from it because it has been
modified, we may likewise say that the monkey is of the same family
as man, that it is a modified man, that man and the monkey have had a
common origin like the horse and ass, that each family has had but a
single source, and even that all the animals have come from a single
animal, which in the succession of ages has produced, while perfecting
and modifying itself, all the races of other animals.... If it were
known that in the animals there had been, I do not say several species,
but a single one which had been produced by modification from another
species; if it were true that the ass is only a modified horse, there
would be no limit to the power of nature, and we would not be wrong in
supposing that from a single being she has known how to derive, with
time, all the other organized beings.”
There is no such clear statement of the evolutionary theory in the
“System of Nature” of Linnaeus, and if Buffon had proclaimed these
views as his own and courageously defended them, he would have made
his name the greatest of the 18th century, and clothed himself
with immortality. But the stuff of martyrs did not enter into his
composition, and the very next passage to the one above, translated
reads--“But no! It is certain from revelation that all animals have
alike been favored with the grace of an act of direct creation, and
that the first pair of every species issued fully formed from the hands
of the creator.”
When the Sorbonne thought it was being fooled it compelled Buffon to
recant publicly and have his recantation printed. In that recantation
he announced, “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation
of the earth and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative
of Moses.”
The impression we get from reading Buffon, is that he did not realize
the importance of those great evolutionary ideas which he stated so
well and repudiated as regularly. Had he done so and stood by them, he
would have been the Darwin of his day, but he would in all likelihood
have spent the latter part of his life in the Bastile.
Not until forty years later do we meet the real and valiant precursor
of Darwin, albeit a countryman of Buffon’s, but with a more profoundly
philosophical mind and without his fear. This was Jean Baptiste
Lamarck, born at Bazentin, France, 1744, and educated at the college
of the Jesuits at Amiens. He served in the seven years war and then
occupied himself studying medicine and science at Paris. He died, poor
and blind, in 1829.
Lamarck boldly proclaimed his unshakable faith in the doctrine of the
transformation of species, and defended it against the strong tide
of popular disfavor and the overwhelming opposition provoked by the
antagonism of the great zoologist Cuvier. Cuvier’s opposition would
have crushed a weaker man but Lamarck bore bravely up and calmly left
his case for the future to decide. Cuvier held species to be constant,
as was consonant with current and orthodox ideas. This made him a
social favorite and the pet of the church, and honors were showered
profusely upon him to the end of his days. Not so Lamarck; although
born 25 years earlier, his theories were half a century in advance of
Cuvier’s, and he paid the penalty that has so often overtaken those
pioneers whose vision anticipated the future.
“Attacked on all sides,” says his friend and colleague, Geoffroy St.
Hilaire, “injured likewise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indignant
to answer these cutting epigrams, submitted to the indignity with a
sorrowful patience.... Lamarck lived a long while poor, blind, and
forsaken, but not by me; I shall ever love and venerate him.” Another
writer of that period exclaims, “Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it
was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who
maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors of their time.” As
to Cuvier, the one stain on his career is his unworthy attitude toward
his celebrated opponent and fellow worker. Lamarck had, with his usual
generosity, aided and favored him when he first came to the Museum of
Natural History at Paris, allowing him to hold, in addition to his
own chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the chair of Molluscs,
which was in Lamarck’s special field, where he had no equal, and which
was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with great politeness and
without mentioning his name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmonize
science with the orthodox theology of his day by means of that theory
of “cataclysms” which in spite of its being strenuously defended by
so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has been relegated to the limbo of
exploded theories.
When Lamarck died, Cuvier as his most notable contemporary was called
upon to pronounce his eulogy. What a miserable and unworthy performance
it was! Even after death, religious antipathy--that ever-flowing
fountain of meanness--survived in Cuvier’s breast, and De Blainville
records that “the Academy did not even allow it to be printed in the
form in which it was pronounced,” and it is said that portions of
it had to be omitted as unfit for publication. Haeckel, speaking of
Lamarck’s great book, “Zoological Philosophy,” complains that “Cuvier,
Lamarck’s greatest opponent, in his ‘Report on the Progress of Natural
Science,’ in which the most unimportant anatomical investigations are
enumerated, does not devote a single word to this work, which forms an
epoch in science.”
But history has reversed the scales and posterity has repaired the
wrong. That theory of biological evolution, which was despised and
rejected by the builders of his day has become the corner-stone of
modern knowledge, while Cuvier’s fantastic “Theory of the Earth” has
gone to the museum of curiosities.
Lamarck’s immortality is secured by his assertion and defense of the
theory of descent, alone. This theory is, that all existing species
have descended from ancestors who were in a vast number of cases, and
ultimately in all, very different from their present representatives;
that this difference is due, not to the total extinction of the
previous species by “cataclysms,” and the divine creation of new ones,
as Cuvier maintained, but because previous species changed in adapting
themselves to a changed environment.
But Lamarck has another claim to a niche in the Pantheon of Science.
As the conviction gained ground that species were not fixed and
immutable as they came from the hands of an alleged creator, but were
the products of an evolutionary development extending through immense
periods of time, another question arose and called for an answer. That
question was--“By what process?”
Charles Darwin is the most illustrious of all the sons of science
because he answered that question. Lamarck gave an answer, and the
question as to whether that answer is entitled to be incorporated
in the answer of Darwin, as a supplementary amendment is sometimes
made a part of the motion, still divides the biological world into
two camps. But in that controversy between the Weismannians and the
Neo-Lamarckians, aptly called “The Battle of the Darwinians,” no matter
what becomes of the Lamarckian factor, all are agreed that the “Natural
Selection” of Darwin is impregnable.
Lamarck’s theory may be summed up as follows--
(1.) Every change in the environment of animals creates for them new
needs.
(2.) These new needs will compel these animals to adopt new habits and
discard some old ones, and these needs and habits will produce and
develop new organs.
(3.) The development or disappearance of organs depends on their use or
disuse.
(4.) The effects of use or disuse, acquired by animals, are transmitted
by heredity to their offspring.
This fourth factor has split the biological world since Weismann
repudiated it in 1883.
As a typical case of the operation of his theory, Lamarck gives the
following: “The serpents having taken up the habit of gliding along the
ground, and of concealing themselves in the grass, their body, owing to
continually repeated efforts to elongate itself so as to pass through
narrow spaces, has acquired a considerable length disproportionate to
its size. Moreover limbs would have been very useless to these animals,
and consequently would not have been employed because long legs would
have interfered with their need of gliding, and very short legs, not
being more than four in number, would have been incapable of moving
their body. Hence the lack of use of these parts having been constant
in the races of these animals, has caused the total disappearance of
these same parts, although really included in the plan of organization
of animals of their class.”
The idea of the serpent getting its long body, or the giraffe its long
neck, or shore birds their long legs by “stretching,” has brought a
good deal of ridicule upon Lamarck’s theory, and that part of it has
never been taken very seriously.
This mistake however, will no more affect Lamarck’s title to a place
among the immortals, than will the equally unfortunate theory of
“pangenesis” endanger the status of his still greater successor--Darwin.
Lamarck’s glory is that he boldly proclaimed and largely proved the
general theory of descent--biological evolution.
We shall now proceed to a consideration of the efforts of the great
savants who have succeeded him, to ascertain its processes.
III.
DARWIN’S NATURAL SELECTION.
In the year 1906, the paper which has the largest circulation among
English Socialists, “The Clarion,” took a vote of its readers as
to whom they considered to be the greatest man, the man who had
contributed most to the progress of the race, which England had
produced. By an overwhelming majority the place of honor went to
Charles Darwin. That vote was as much a vindication of English
Socialists as it was of the man whose name has become almost a synonym
for “modern science.”
Liebknecht, in his “Biographical Memoirs of Karl Marx”, speaking of
Marx and himself, says: ”When Darwin drew the consequences of his
investigations and presented them to the public, we spoke for months of
nothing else but Darwin and the revolutionizing power of his scientific
conquests.”
Leopold Jacoby writes thus: “The same year in which appeared Darwin’s
book (1859) and coming from a quite different direction, an identical
impulse was given to a very important development of social science by
a work which long passed unnoticed, and which bore the title: “Critique
of Political Economy” by Karl Marx--it was the forerunner of Capital.
What Darwin’s book on the “Origin of Species” is on the subject of the
genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to
Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution
of association among human beings, of States, and the social forms of
humanity.”
Commenting on this passage of Jacoby’s Enrico Ferri says: “And this
is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the
development of the Darwinian theories, is also the most fruitful field
for the intelligent, systematic propaganda of socialist ideas. And it
is precisely for this reason that in Berlin, in the windows of the
book-stores of the socialist propaganda, the works of Charles Darwin
occupy the place of honor beside those of Karl Marx.”
Frederick Engels, in his reply to Duehring, speaks of Darwin as
follows: “He dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest
blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man
himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through
millions of years. In this connection Darwin must be named before all
others.”
Again, in the preface to the “Communist Manifesto” speaking of the
materialistic conception of history, he says: “This proposition, in my
opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done
for biology.”
And speaking at the grave-side of his illustrious colleague--Marx, he
said: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development in organic
nature, so Marx discovered the law of development in human society.”
Says August Bebel, in “Woman,” “Marx, Darwin, Buckle, have all three,
each in his own way, been of the greatest significance for modern
development and the future form and growth of human society will, to an
extreme degree, be shaped and guided by their teaching and discoveries.”
And Kautsky in his work on ethics declares that Darwin’s discoveries
“belong to the greatest and most fruitful of the human intellect, and
enable us to develop a new critique of knowledge.”
Ernest Untermann, in his latest work “Marxian Economics,” well says:
“Marx discovered the specific laws of social development among human
beings. * * * But while doing this, it never occurred to him to
disregard the results of Darwin’s work. On the contrary, he knew the
art of combining Darwin’s results with his own, without doing violence
to either.”
This evidence of the general consensus of opinion among Socialist
scholars as to the value of Darwin’s work and its special importance
for Socialism could easily be enlarged indefinitely. But enough
has been cited to show that a comprehensive grasp of the Socialist
philosophy implies a knowledge of Darwinian theories.
The greatness of Darwin’s work has two aspects; the immense impetus
he gave to the general theory of evolution, and, his discovery of its
main process, “natural selection.” In the popular mind this distinction
is lost in confusion and a great army of popular but ill-informed
expounders have added to the muddle. The two things although closely
related--cause and effect--are yet quite distinct, and a clearer
understanding of Darwin’s work is made possible by the distinction
being kept in mind. The honor of having discovered “natural selection”
Darwin shares with Wallace only; as a contributor to the theory of
evolution, he is one of a long and illustrious line. But even here he
is the greatest of them all precisely because of his specific discovery
which, by explaining how evolution works--at least among living
things, (biology)--has made the general theory impregnable.
Before proceeding to that specific theory let us clearly understand
that evolution has ceased to be a theory merely, it is also a well
established fact. Anyone who denies this has no part or lot in the
intellectual life of the last half century. Such a one, as Professor
Giddings recently said, “inhabits a world of intellectual shades. He
cannot grasp the earthly interests of the twentieth century.”
Every science in the biological hierarchy has contributed its quota to
the establishment of the theory of evolution, and that theory in return
has, in one department after another, produced order and system where
before nothing existed but a conglomerate mass of apparently unrelated
facts. So thoroughly has the theory impregnated every branch of science
that an intelligent dentist must be an evolutionist.