against the freedom of the human mind will render it needless to follow
the history of the development of Christian polity and dogma--the
temporalizing of the one, and the crystallizing of the other. Yet one
prominent actor in that history demands a brief notice, because of the
influence which his teaching wielded from the fifth to the fifteenth
centuries. The annals of the churches in Africa, along whose northern
shores Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield notable names,
but none so distinguished as that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395
to 430 A. D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church sought, as has
been remarked already, to bring the system of Aristotle, the greatest of
ancient naturalists, into line with Christian theology. His range of
study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous Stagirite, but we are
here concerned only with so much of it as bears on an attempt to graft
the development theory on the dogma of special creation. Augustine,
accepting the Old Testament cosmogony as a revelation, believed
that the world was created out of nothing, but, this initial paradox
accepted, he argued that God had endowed matter with certain powers of
self-development which left free the operation of natural causes in the
production of plants and animals. With this, however, as already noted,
he held, with preceding philosophers and with his fellow-theologians,
the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It explained to him the
existence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, frogs, mice,
etc. "Certain very small animals," he says, "may not have been created
on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from
putrefying matter." Not till the seventeenth century did the experiments
of Redi refute a doctrine which had held part of the biological field
for above two thousand years, and which still has adherents. Of course
Augustine, as do modern Catholic biologists, excepted man from the
operation of secondary causes, and held that his soul was created by
the direct intervention of the Creator. Augustine's concessions are,
therefore, more seeming than real, and, moreover, we find him denying
the existence of the antipodes on the ground that Scripture is silent
about them, and also, that if God had placed any races there, they could
not see Christ descending at his second coming. To Augustine the air was
full of devils who are the cause of "all diseases of Christians." In
other words, he was not ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, he
shows that allegorizing spirit which was manifest in Greece a thousand
years earlier; the spirit which reads hidden meanings in Homer, in
Horace, and in Omar Khayyám; and which, in the hands of present-day
Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, converts the plain
narratives of Old and New Testaments into vehicles of mysterious types
and esoteric symbols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augustine
explains the outside and inside pitching of the ark as typifying the
safety of the Church from the leaking-in of heresy; while the ghastly
application of symbolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the words
of Jesus, "Compel them to come in," as a Divine warrant for the
slaughter of heretics.
We shall meet with no other such commanding figure in Church history
till nine hundred years have passed, when Thomas Aquinas, the "Angel of
the Schools," appears, but although that period marks no advance of the
Church from her central position, it witnessed changes in her fortune
through the intrusion of a strange people into her territory and
sanctuaries.
* * * * *
Perhaps there are few events in history more impressive than the
conversion of the wild and ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century
from stone-worship to monotheism. The series of conquests which followed
had also, as an indirect and unforeseen result, effects of vast
importance in the revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris to
the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does the inquiry fall within
our present purpose, to discover the special impulses which led
Mohammed, the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith whose one
creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the unity of God. Large numbers
of Jews and Christians had settled in Arabia long before his time, and
he had become acquainted with the narrowness of the one, and with the
causes of the wranglings of the other, riven, as these last-named were,
into sects quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. These,
and the fetichism of his fellow-countrymen, may, perhaps, have impelled
him to start a crusade the mandate for which he, in fanatic impulse,
believed came from heaven. The result is well known. The hitherto
untamed nomads became the eager instruments of the prophet. Under his
leadership, and that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag of
Islam was carried from East to West, till within one hundred years of
the flight of Mohammed from Mecca (622 A. D.) it waved from the Indian
Ocean to the Atlantic. With the conquest of Syria there was achieved
one of the greatest and most momentous of triumphs in the capture of
Jerusalem, and the seizure of sites sanctified to Christians by
association with the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
Only a few years before (614 A. D.), the holy city had been taken by
Chosroes; the sacred buildings raised over the venerated tomb had been
burned, and the cross--a spurious relic--carried off by the Persian
king. These places have been, as it were, the cockpit of Christendom
from the time of the siege of Jerusalem under Titus to that of the
Crimean war, when blood was spilt like water in a conflict stirred by
squabbles between Latin and Greek Christians over possession of the key
of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre these sectaries are still kept from flying at one another's
throats by the muskets of Mohammedan soldiers.
The Arabian conquest of Persia followed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt
soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after
the prophets' death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of
intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably
under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through
the propagandism of Christianity among the Hellenized Jews, of whom, as
of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace
of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the
controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of
Constantinople and the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years'
pause, the Saracens (Ar., _sharkiin_, orientals) resumed their
conquering march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous
centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In "the fair and
fertile isle of Andalusia" the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his
luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt
to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six
years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and northwestern
portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their
independence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt,
Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet
with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their
advance in Western Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before
Constantinople by Leo III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent
of Mohammedan conquest was first checked.
Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if
tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast
Alexandrian library. "A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free
research that may contradict it," and Islam has ever been a worse foe to
science than Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the
renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental as the story of it is
interesting.
Under the Sassanian kings, Persia had become an active centre of
intellectual life, reaching the climax of its Augustan age in the reign
of Chosroes. Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at his court,
and translations of the writings of the Indian sages completed the
eclecticism of that enlightened monarch. Then came the ruthless Arab,
and philosophy and science were eclipsed. But with the advent of the
Abbaside Khalifs, who number the famous Haroun al-Raschid among them,
there came revival of the widest toleration, and consequent return of
intellectual activity. Baghdad arose as the seat of empire. Situated on
the high road of Oriental commerce, along which travelled foreign ideas
and foreign culture, that city became also the Oxford of her time.
Arabic was the language of the conquerors, and into that poetic, but
unphilosophic, tongue, Greek philosophy and science were rendered. Under
the rule of those Khalifs, says Renan, "nontolerant, nonreluctant
persecutors," free thought developed; the _Motecallenim_ or "disputants"
held debates, where all religions were examined in the light of reason.
Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy were text-books in the colleges,
the repute of whose teachers brought to Baghdad and Naishapur (dear to
lovers of "old" Khayyám) students westward from Spain, and eastward from
Transoxiana.
"Arab" philosophy, therefore, is only a name. It has been well
described as "a system of Greek thought expressed in a Semitic tongue;
and modified by Oriental influences called into existence by the
patronage of the more liberal princes, and kept alive by the zeal of a
small band of thinkers." In the main, it began and ended with the study
of Aristotle, commentaries on whom became the chief work of scholars, at
whose head stands the great name of Averroes. Through these--a handful
of Jews and Moslems--knowledge of Greek science, of astronomy, algebra,
chemistry, and medicine, was carried into Western Europe. By the latter
half of the tenth century, one hundred and fifty years after the
translation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become no mean rival of
Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were founded; colleges to which the Girton
girls of the period could repair to learn mathematics and history were
set up by lady principals; manufactures and agriculture were encouraged;
and lovely and stately palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova,
Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the far-famed Alhâmra or Red
Fortress still overlooks. Seven hundred years before there was a public
lamp in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy roadways bordered
by windowless dwellings, Cordova had miles of well-lighted, well-paved
streets; and the constant use of the bath by the "infidel" contrasted
with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride of flesh-mortifying
devotees and the outward and odorous signs of their religion. The pages
of our dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and chemical
terms; in the names of the principal "fixed" stars; and in the words
"admiral" and "chemise"; the influence of the "Arab" in science, war,
and dress.
It forms no part of our story to tell how feuds between rival dynasties
and rival sects of Islam, becoming more acute as time went on, enabled
Christianity to recover lost ground, and, in the capture of Granada in
1492, to put an end to Moorish rule in Spain. Before that event, a
knowledge of Greek philosophy had been diffused through Christendom by
the translation of the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and other scholars,
into Latin. That was about the middle of the twelfth century, when
Aristotle, who had been translated into Arabic some three centuries
earlier, also appeared in Latin dress. The detachment of any branch of
knowledge from theology being a thing undreamed of, the deep reverence
in which the Stagirite was held by his Arabian commentators ultimately
led to his becoming "suspect" by the Christians, since that which
approved itself to the followers of Mohammed must, _ipso facto_, be
condemned by the followers of Jesus. Hence came reaction, and recourse
to the Scriptures as sole guide to secular as well as sacred knowledge;
recourse to a method which, as Hallam says, "had not untied a single
knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy."
So far as the scanty records tell (for we may never know how much was
suppressed, or fell into oblivion, under ecclesiastical frowns and
threats; nor how many thinkers toiled in secret and in dread), none
seemed possessed either of courage or desire to supplement the revealed
word by examination into things themselves. To supplant it was not
dreamed of. But, in the middle of the thirteenth century, one notable
exception occurred in the person of Roger Bacon, sometimes called Friar
Bacon in virtue of his belonging to the order of Franciscans. He was
born in 1214 at Ilchester, in Somerset, whence he afterward removed to
Oxford, and thence to Paris. That this remarkable and many-sided man,
classic and Arabic scholar, mathematician, and natural philosopher,
has not a more recognised place in the annals of science is strange,
although it is, perhaps, partly explained by the fact that his writings
were not reissued for more than three centuries after his death. He has
been credited with a number of inventions, his title to which is however
doubtful, although the doubt in nowise impairs the greatness of his
name. He shared the current belief in alchemy, but made a number of
experiments in chemistry pointing to his knowledge of the properties of
the various gases, and of the components of gunpowder. If he did not
invent spectacles, or the microscope and telescope, he was skilled in
optics, and knew the principles on which those instruments are made,
as the following extract from his Opus Majus shows: "We can place
transparent bodies in such a form and position between our eyes and
other objects that the rays shall be refracted and bent toward any place
we please, so that we shall see the object near at hand, or at a
distance, under any angle we please; and thus from an incredible
distance we may read the smallest letters, and may number the smallest
particles of sand, by reason of the greatness of the angle under which
they appear." He knew the "wisdom of the ancients" in the cataloguing of
the stars, and suggested a reform of the calendar--following the then
unknown poet-astronomer of Naishapur. But he believed in astrology, that
bastard science which from remotest times had ruled the life of man, and
which has no small number of votaries among ourselves to this day. Roger
Bacon's abiding title to fame rests, however, on his insistence on
the necessity of experiment, and his enforcement of this precept by
practice. As a mathematician he laid stress on the application of this
"first of all the sciences"; indeed, as "preceding all others, and as
disposing us to them." His experiments, both from their nature and the
seclusion in which they were made, laid him open to the charge of black
magic, in other words, of being in league with the devil. This, in the
hands of a theology thus "possessed," became an instrument of awful
torture to mankind. Roger Bacon's denial of magic only aggravated his
crime, since in ecclesiastical ears, this was tantamount to a denial of
the activity, nay more, of the very existence of Satan. So, despite
certain encouragement in his scientific work from an old friend who
afterward became Pope Clement IV., for whose information he wrote his
Opus Majus, he was, on the death of that potentate, thrown into prison,
whence tradition says he emerged, after ten years, only to die.
The theories of mediæval schoolmen--a monotonous record of unprogressive
ideas--need not be scheduled here, the more so as we approach the period
of discoveries momentous in their ultimate effect upon opinions which
now possess only the value attaching to the history of discredited
conceptions of the universe. Commerce, more than scientific curiosity,
gave the impetus to the discovery that the earth is a globe. Trade with
the East was divided between Genoa and Venice. These cities were rivals,
and the Genoese, alarmed at the growing success of the Venetians,
resolved to try to reach India from the west. Their schemes were
justified by reports of land indications brought by seamen who had
passed through the "Pillars of Hercules" to the Atlantic. The sequel is
well known. Columbus, after clerical opposition, and rebuffs from other
states, "offering," as Mr. Payne says, in his excellent History of
America, "though he knew it not, the New World in exchange for three
ships and provisions for twelve months," finally secured the support of
the Spanish king, and sailed from Cadiz on the 3d of August, 1492. On
11th of October he sighted the fringes of the New World, and believing
that he had sailed from Spain to India, gave the name West Indies to the
island-group. America itself had been discovered by roving Norsemen five
hundred years before, but the fact was buried in Icelandic tradition.
Following Columbus, Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese, set sail in 1497, and
taking a southerly course, doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two
years later, Ferdinand Magellan started on a voyage more famous than
that of Columbus, since his ambition was to sail round the world, and
thus complete the chain of proof against the theory of its flatness. For
"though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth
should be a widespread plain bordered by the waters, yet he comforted
himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow
cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner,
is the substance." Doubling Cape Horn through the straits that bear his
name, Magellan entered the vast ocean whose calm surface caused him to
call it the Pacific, and after terrible sufferings, he reached the
Ladrone Islands where, either at the hands of a mutinous crew, or of
savages, he was killed. His chief lieutenant, Sebastian d'Eleano,
continued the voyage, and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, brought
the San Vittoria--name of happy omen--to anchor at St. Lucar, near
Seville, on 7th of September, 1522. Brought, too, the story of a
circumnavigated globe, and of new groups of stars never seen under
northern skies.
The scene shifts, for the time being, from the earth to the heavens. The
Church had barely recovered from the blow struck at her authority on
matters of secular knowledge, when another dealt, and that by an
ecclesiastic, Copernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, in Prussia. But before
pursuing this, some reference to the revolt against the Church of Rome,
which is the great event of the sixteenth century, is necessary, if only
to inquire whether the movement known as the Reformation justified its
name as freeing the intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as
were the areas which it covered and the effects which it wrought, its
quarrel with the Church of Rome was not because of that Church's
attitude toward freedom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest of
nobler minds against the corruptions fostered by the Papacy; in England,
it was personal and political in origin, securing popular support by its
anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national irritation against
foreign control. But, both here and abroad, it sought mending rather
than ending; "not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic." It
disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole interpreter of
Scripture, and contended that such interpretation was the right and duty
of the individual. But it would not admit the right of the individual to
call in question the authority of the Bible itself: to that book alone
must a man go for knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual.
So that the Reformation was but an exchange of fetters, or, as Huxley
happily puts it, the scraping of a little rust off the chains which
still bound the mind. "Learning perished where Luther reigned," said
Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Reformer agreeing with his
coadjutor, Melanchthon, in permitting no tampering with the written
Word. Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that the earth was
fixed and that sun and stars travelled round it, because the Bible said
so. Peter Martyr, one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Commentary
on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions about the creation as narrated
in that book would render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein
he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called them "locusts,
caterpillars, frogs, and lice." Reason he denounced as the "arch whore"
and the "devil's bride," Aristotle is a "prince of darkness, horrid
impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and twice execrable."
Consistently enough, Luther believed vehemently in a personal devil, and
in witches; "I would myself burn them," he says, "even as it is written
in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders." To him demoniacal
possession was a fact clear as noonday: idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all
other mental and nervous disorders were due to it. Hence, a movement
whose intent appeared to be the freeing of the human spirit riveted more
tightly the bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical explanation
of mental diseases and that curative treatment of them which is one of
the countless services of science to suffering mankind. To Luther, the
descent of Christ into hell, which modern research has shown to be a
variant of an Orphic legend of the underworld, was a real event, Jesus
going thither that he might conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.
Therefore, freedom of thought, as we define it, had the bitterest foe in
Luther, although, in his condemnation of "works," and his fanatical
dogma of man's "justification by faith alone," which made him reject the
Epistle of James as one "of straw," and as unworthy of a place in the
Canon, he unwittingly drove in the thin end of the rationalist wedge.
The Reformers had hedged the canonical books with theories of verbal
inspiration which extended even to the punctuation of the sentences.
They thus rendered intelligent study of the Bible impossible, and did
grievous injury to a collection of writings of vast historical value,
and of abiding interest as records of man's primitive speculations and
spiritual development. But Luther's application of the right of private
judgment to the omission or addition of this or that book into a canon
which had been closed by a Council of the Church, surrendered the whole
position, since there was no telling where the thing might stop.
Copernicus waited full thirty years before he ventured to make his
theory public. The Ptolemaic system, which assumed a fixed earth with
sun, moon, and stars revolving above it, had held the field for about
fourteen hundred years. It accorded with Scripture; it was adopted
by the Church; and, moreover, it was confirmed by the senses, the
correction of which still remains, and will long remain, a condition of
intellectual advance. Little wonder is it, then, that Copernicus
hesitated to broach a theory thus supported, or that, when published, it
was put forth in tentative form as a possible explanation more in accord
with the phenomena. A preface, presumably by a friendly hand, commended
the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies to Pope Paul III. It urged that
"as in previous times others had been allowed the privilege of feigning
what circles they chose in order to explain the phenomena," Copernicus
"had conceived that he might take the liberty of trying whether, on the
supposition of the earth's motion, it was possible to find better
explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial
orbs." A copy of the book was placed in the hands of its author only a
few hours before his death on 23d of May, 1543.
This "upstart astrologer," this "fool who wishes to reverse the entire
science of astronomy," for "sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua
commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth"--these are Luther's
words--was, therefore, beyond the grip of the Holy Inquisition. But a
substitute was forthcoming. Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, had added
to certain heterodox beliefs the heresy of Copernicanism, which he
publicly taught from Oxford to Venice. For these cumulative crimes he
was imprisoned and, after two years, condemned to be put to death
"as mercifully as possible and without the shedding of his blood," a
Catholic euphemism for burning a man alive. The murder was committed in
Rome on 17th of February, 1600.
The year 1543 marks an epoch in biology as in astronomy. As shown in the
researches of Galen, an Alexandrian physician of the second century,
there had been no difficulty in studying the structure of the lower
animals, but, fortified both by tradition and by prejudice, the Church
refused to permit dissection of the human body, and in the latter part
of the thirteenth century, Boniface VIII. issued a Bull of the major
excommunication against offenders. Prohibition, as usual, led to
evasion, and Vesalius, Professor of Anatomy in Padua University,
resorted to various devices to procure "subjects," the bodies of
criminals being easiest to obtain. The end justified the means, as he
was able to correct certain errors of Galen, and to give the _quietus_
to the old legend, based upon the myth of the creation of Eve, that man
has one rib less than woman. This was among the discoveries announced in
his De Corporis Humani Fabrica, published when he was only twenty-eight
years of age. The book fell under the ban of the Church because Vesalius
gave no support to the belief in an indestructible bone, nucleus of the
resurrection body, in man. The belief had, no doubt, near relation to
that of the Jews in the _os sacru_, and may remind us of Descartes'
fanciful location of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the brain
known as the _conarium_, or pineal gland. On some baseless charge of
attempting the dissection of a living subject, the Inquisition haled
Vesalius to prison, and would have put him to death "as mercifully as
possible," but for the intervention of King Charles V. of Spain, to
whom Vesalius had been physician. Returning in October, 1564, from a
pilgrimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his alleged offence, he
was shipwrecked on the coast of Zante, and died of exhaustion.
While the heretical character and tendencies of discoveries in astronomy
and anatomy awoke active opposition from the Church, the work of men of
the type of Gesner, the eminent Swiss naturalist, and of Caesalpino,
professor of botany at Padua, passed unquestioned. No dogma was
endangered by the classification of plants and animals. But when a
couple of generations after the death of Copernicus had passed, the
Inquisition found a second victim in the famous Galileo, who was born at
Pisa in 1564. After spending some years in mechanical and mathematical
pursuits, he began a series of observations in confirmation of the
Copernican theory, of the truth of which he had been convinced in early
life. With the aid of a rude telescope, made by his own hands, he
discovered the satellites of Jupiter; the moon-like phases of Venus and
Mars; mountains and valleys in the moon; spots on the sun's disk; and
the countless stars which composed the luminous band known as the Milky
Way. Nought occurred to disturb his observations till, in a work on the
Solar Spots, he explained the movements of the earth and of the heavenly
bodies according to Copernicus. On the appearance of that book the
authorities contented themselves with a caution to the author. But
action followed his supplemental Dialogue on the Copernican and
Ptolemaic Systems. Through that convenient medium which the title
implies, Galileo makes the defender of the Copernican theory an easy
victor, and for this he was brought before the Inquisition in 1633.
After a tedious trial, and threats of "rigorous personal examination,"
a euphemism for "torture," he was, despite the plea--too specious to
deceive--that he had merely put the _pros_ and _cons_ as between the
rival theories, condemned to abjure all that he had taught. There is a
story, probably fictitious, since it was first told in 1789, that when
the old man rose from his knees, he muttered his conviction that the
earth moves, in the words "e pur si muove." As a sample of the arguments
used by the ecclesiastics when they substituted, as rare exception, the
pen for the faggot, the reasoning advanced by one Sizzi against the
existence of Jupiter's moons, may be cited. "There are seven windows
given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is
admitted to the tabernacle of the body, viz.: two nostrils, two eyes,
two ears, and one mouth. So, in the heavens, as in a macrocosm, or
great world, there are two favourable stars, Jupiter and Venus; two
unpropitious, Mars and Saturn; two luminaries, the sun and moon, and
Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From these and many other
phenomena of Nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that
the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover, the satellites are
invisible to the naked eye, and, therefore, can exercise no influence
over the earth, and would, of course, be useless; and, therefore, do not
exist."
In this brief summary of the attitude of the Church toward science, it
is not possible, and if it were so, it is not needful, to refer in
detail to the contributions of the more speculative philosophers, who,
although they made no discoveries, advocated those methods of research
and directions of inquiry which made the discoveries possible. Among
these a prominent name is that of Lord Bacon, whose system of
philosophy, known as the Inductive, proceeds from the collection,
examination and comparison of any group of connected facts to the
relation of them to some general principle. The universal is thus
explained by the particular. But the inductive method was no invention
of Bacon's; wherever observation or testing of a thing preceded
speculation about it, as with his greater namesake, there the Baconian
system had its application. Lord Bacon, moreover, undervalued Greek
science; he argued against the Copernican theory; and either knew
nothing of, or ignored, Harvey's momentous discovery of the circulation
of the blood. A more illustrious name than his is that of René
Descartes, a man who combined theory with observation; "one who," in
Huxley's words, "saw that the discoveries of Galileo meant that the
remotest parts of the universe were governed by mechanical laws, while
those of Harvey meant that the same laws presided over the operations of
that portion of the world which is nearest to us, namely, our own bodily
frame." The greatness of this man, a good Catholic, whom the Jesuits
charged with Atheism, has no mean tribute in his influence on an equally
remarkable man, Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza reduced the Cartesian analysis
of phenomena into God, mind and matter to one phenomenon, namely, God,
of whom matter and spirit, extension and thought, are but attributes.
His short life fell within the longer span of Newton's, whose strange
subjection to the theological influences of his age is seen in this
immortal interpreter of the laws of the universe wasting his later
years on an attempt to interpret unfulfilled prophecy. These and others,
as Locke, Leibnitz, Herder, and Schelling, like the great Hebrew leader,
had glimpses of a goodly land which they were not themselves to enter.
But, perhaps, in the roll of illustrious men to whom prevision came,
none have better claim to everlasting remembrance than Immanuel Kant.
For in his Theory of the Heavens, published in 1755, he anticipates that
hypothesis of the origin of the present universe which, associated with
the succeeding names of Laplace and Herschel, has, under corrections
furnished by modern physics, common acceptance among us. Then, as shown
in the following extract, Kant foresees the theory of the development of
life from formless stuff to the highest types: "It is desirable to
examine the great domain of organized beings by means of a methodical
comparative anatomy, in order to discover whether we may not find in
them something resembling a system, and that too in connection with
their mode of generation, so that we may not be compelled to stop short
with a mere consideration of forms as they are--which gives no insight
into their generation--and need not despair of gaining a full insight
into this department of Nature. The agreement of so many kinds of
animals in a certain common plan of structure, which seems to be visible
not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the other
parts--so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening or
lengthening of some parts, and by the suppression and development of
others, might be able to produce an immense variety of species--gives us
a ray of hope, though feeble, that here perhaps some results may be
obtained, by the application of the principle of the mechanism of
Nature; without which, in fact, no science can exist. This analogy of
forms (in so far as they seem to have been produced in accordance with
a common prototype, notwithstanding their great variety) strengthens
the supposition that they have an actual blood-relationship, due to
derivation from a common parent; a supposition which is arrived at by
observation of the graduated approximation of one class of animals to
another, beginning with the one in which the principle of purposiveness
seems to be most conspicuous, namely, man, and extending down to the
polyps, and from these even down to mosses and lichens, and arriving
finally at raw matter, the lowest stage of Nature observable by us. From
this raw matter and its forces, the whole apparatus of Nature seems to
have been derived according to mechanical laws (such as those which
resulted in the production of crystals); yet this apparatus, as seen in
organic beings, is so incomprehensible to us, that we feel ourselves
compelled to conceive for it a different principle. But it would seem
that the archæologist of Nature is at liberty to regard the great
Family of creatures (for as a Family we must conceive it, if the
above-mentioned continuous and connected relationship has a real
foundation) as having sprung from their immediate results of her
earliest revolutions, judging from all the laws of their mechanisms
known to or conjectured by him."
In our arrival at the age of these seers, we feel the play of a freer,
purer air; a lull in the miasmatic currents that bring intolerance on
their wings. The tolerance that approaches is due to no surrender of its
main position by dogmatic theology, but to that larger perception of the
variety and complexity of life, ignorance of, or wilful blindness to,
which is the secret of the survival of rigid opinion. The demonstration
of the earth's roundness; the discovery of America; the growing
conception of inter-relation between the lowest and the highest
life-forms; the slow but sure acceptance of the Copernican theory; and,
above all, the idea of a Cosmos, an unbroken order, to which every
advance in knowledge contributes, justified and fostered the free play
of the intellect. Foreign as yet, however, to the minds of widest
breadth, was the conception of the inclusion of MAN himself in the
universal order. Duality--Nature overruled by supernature--was the
unaltered note; the supernature as part of Nature a thing undreamed of.
Nor could it be otherwise while the belief in diabolical agencies still
held the field, sending wretched victims to the stake on the evidence of
conscientious witnesses, and with the concurrence of humane judges.
Animism, the root of all personification, whether of good or evil, had
lost none of its essential character, and but little of its vigour.
"I flatter myself," says Hume, in the opening words of the essay upon
Miracles, in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "that I have
discovered an argument of a like nature (he is referring to Archbishop
Tillotson's argument on Transubstantiation) which, if just, will,
with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kind of
superstitious delusion, and, consequently, will be useful as long as the
world endures." Hume certainly did not overrate the force of the blow
which he dealt at supernaturalism, one of a series of attacks which, in
France and Britain, carried the war into the camp of the enemy, and
changed its tactics from aggressive to defensive. But none the less is
it true that the "superstitious delusions" against which he planted his
logical artillery were killed neither by argument nor by evidence.
Delusion and error do not perish by controversial warfare. They perish
under the slow and silent operation of changes to which they are unable
to adapt themselves. The atmosphere is altered: the organism can neither
respond nor respire; therefore, it dies. Thus, save where lurks the
ignorance which is its breath of life, has wholly perished belief in
witchcraft; thus, too, is slowly perishing belief in miracles, and, with
this, belief in the miraculous events, the incarnation, resurrection,
and ascension of Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets of Christianity
are based, and in which lies so largely the secret of its long hostility
to knowledge.
_PART III._
THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE.
A. D. 1600 ONWARDS.
"Though science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork,
ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again."--HUXLEY,
Prologue to Collected Essays, vol. v.
The exercise of a more tolerant spirit, to which reference has been
made, had its limits. It is true that Dr. South, a famous divine,
denounced the Royal Society (founded 1645) as an irreligious body;
although a Dr. Wallis, one of the first members, especially declared
that "matters of theology" were "precluded": the business being "to
discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries and such as related
thereunto; as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments; with the
state of these studies, and their cultivation at home and abroad."
Regardless of South and such as agreed with him, Torricelli worked at
hydrodynamics, and discovered the principle of the barometer; Boyle
inquired into the law of the compressibility of gases; Malpighi examined
minute life-forms and the structure of organs under the microscope; Ray
and Willughby classified plants and animals; Newton theorized on the
nature of light; and Roemer measured its speed; Halley estimated the
sun's distance, predicted the return of comets, and observed the
transits of Venus and Mercury; Hunter dissected specimens, and laid the
foundations of the science of comparative anatomy; and many another
illustrious worker contributed to the world's stock of knowledge
"without let or hindrance," for in all this "matters of theology were
precluded."
But the old spirit of resistance was aroused when, after a long lapse of
time, inquiry was revived in a branch of science which, it will be
noticed, has no distinct place in the subjects dealt with by the Royal
Society at the start. That science was Geology; a science destined, in
its ultimate scope, to prove a far more powerful dissolvent of dogma
than any of its compeers.
It seems strange that the discovery of the earth's true shape and
movements was not sooner followed by investigation into her contents,
but the old ideas of special creation remained unaffected by these and
other discoveries, and the more or less detailed account of the process
of creation furnished in the book of Genesis sufficed to arrest
curiosity. In the various departments of the inorganic universe the
earth was the last to become subject of scientific research; as in study
of the organic universe, man excluded himself till science compelled his
inclusion.
After more than two thousand years, the Ionian philosophers "come to
their own" again. Xenophanes of Colophon has been referred to as
arriving, five centuries B. C., at a true explanation of the imprints of
plants and animals in rocks. Pythagoras, who lived before him, may, if
Ovid, writing near the Christian era, is to be trusted, have reached
some sound conclusions about the action of water in the changes of land
and sea areas. But we are on surer ground when we meet the geographer
Strabo, who lived in the reign of Augustus. Describing the countries in
which he travelled, he notes their various features, and explains the
causes of earthquakes and allied phenomena. Then eleven hundred years
pass before we find any explanation of like rational character supplied.
This was furnished by the Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, whose theory of
the origin of mountains is the more marvellous when we remember what
intellectual darkness surrounded him. He says that "mountains may be due
to two different causes. Either they are effects of upheavals of the
crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or
they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has
denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft,
some hard. The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the
other intact. Most of the eminences of the earth have had this latter
origin. It would require a long period of time for all such changes to
be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat
diminished in size. But that water has been the main cause of these
effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic and
other animals on many mountains" (cf. Osborn's From the Greeks to
Darwin, p. 76). A similar explanation of fossils was given by the
engineer-artist Leonardo de Vinci in the fifteenth century, and by the
potter Bernard Palissy, in the sixteenth century; but thence onward,
for more than a hundred years, the earth was as a sealed book to man.
The earlier chapters of its history, once reopened, have never been
closed again. Varied as were the theories of the causes which wrought
manifold changes on its surface, they agreed in demanding a far longer
time-history than the Church was willing to allow. If the reasoning of
the geologists was sound, the narrative in Genesis was a myth. Hence
the renewal of struggle between the Christian Church and Science,
waged, at first, over the six days of the Creation.
Here and there, in bygone days, a sceptical voice had been raised in
denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Such was that of La
Peyrère who, in 1655, published an instalment of a work in which he
anticipated what is nowadays accepted, but what then was akin to
blasphemy to utter. For not only does he doubt whether Moses had any
hand in the writings attributed to him: he rejects the orthodox view of
suffering and death as the penalties of Adam's disobedience; and gives
rationalistic interpretation of the appearance of the star of Bethlehem,
and of the darkness at the Crucifixion. But La Peyrère became a Roman
Catholic, and, of course, recanted his opinions. Then, nearer the time
when controversy on the historical character of the Scriptures was
becoming active, one Astruc, a French physician, suggested, in a work
published in 1753, that Moses may have used older materials in his
compilation of the earlier parts of the Pentateuch.
But, practically, the five books included under that name, were believed
to have been written by Moses under divine authority. The statement in
Genesis that God made the universe and its contents, both living and
non-living, in six days of twenty-four hours each, was explicit. Thus
interpreted, as their plain meaning warranted, Archbishop Usher made his
famous calculation as to the time elapsing between the creation and the
birth of Christ. Dr. White, in his important Warfare of Science with
Theology, gives an amusing example of the application of Usher's method
in detail. A seventeenth century divine, Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge University, computed that "man was created by the Trinity
on 23d October, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning." The same
theologian, who, by the way, was a very eminent Hebrew scholar,
following the interpretation of the great Fathers of the Church,
"declared, as the result of profound and exhaustive study of the
Scriptures, that 'heaven and earth, centre and circumference, and clouds
full of water, were created all together, in the same instant.'"
The story of the Deluge was held to furnish sufficing explanation of the
organic remains yielded by the rocks, but failing this, a multitude of
fantastic theories were at hand to explain the fossils. They were said
to be due to a "formative quality" in the soil; to its "plastic virtue";
to a "lapidific juice"; to the "fermentation of fatty matter"; to "the
influence of the heavenly bodies," or, as the late eminent naturalist,
Philip Gosse, seriously suggested in his whimsical book Omphalos: an
Attempt to untie the Geological Knot, they were but simulacra wherewith
a mocking Deity rebuked the curiosity of man. Every explanation, save
the right and obvious one, had its defenders, because it was essential
to support some theory to rebut the evidence supplied by remains of
animals as to the existence of death in the world before the fall of
Adam. Otherwise, the statements in the Old Testament, on which the
Pauline reasoning rested, were baseless, and to discredit these was
to undermine the authority of the Scriptures from Genesis to the
Apocalypse. No wonder, therefore, that theology was up in arms, or that
it saw in geology a deadlier foe than astronomy had seemed to be in ages
past. The Sorbonne, or Faculty of Theology, in Paris burnt the books of
the geologists, banished their authors, and, in the case of Buffon, the
famous naturalist, condemned him to retract the awful heresy, which was
declared "contrary to the creed of the Church," contained in these
words: "The waters of the sea have produced the mountains and valleys
of the land; the waters of the heavens, reducing all to a level, will at
last deliver the whole land over to the sea, and the sea successively
prevailing over the land, will leave dry new continents like those which
we inhabit." So the old man repeated the submission of Galileo, and
published his recantation: "I declare that I had no intention to
contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein
related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact.
I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth,
and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." That
was in the year 1751.
If the English theologians could not deliver heretics of the type of
Buffon to the secular arm, they used all the means that denunciation
supplied for delivering them over to Satan. Epithets were hurled at
them; arguments drawn from a world accursed of God levelled at them.
Saint Jerome, living in the fourth century, had pointed to the cracked
and crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger: now Wesley and others saw
in "sin the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause
might be," since before Adam's transgression, no convulsions or
eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. Meanwhile, the probing of the
earth's crust went on; revealing, amidst all the seeming confusion of
distorted and metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying sequence of strata, and
of the fossils imbedded in them. Different causes were assigned for the
vast changes ranging over vast periods; one school believing in the
action of volcanic and such like catastrophic agents; another in
the action of aqueous agents, seeing, more consistently, in present
operations the explanation of the causes of past changes. But there
was no diversity of opinion concerning the extension of the earth's
time-history and life-history to millions on millions of years.
So, when this was to be no longer resisted, theologians sought some
basis of compromise on such non-fundamental points as the six days of
creation. It was suggested that perhaps these did not mean the seventh
part of a week, but periods, or eons, or something equally elastic; and
that if the Mosaic narrative was regarded as a poetic revelation of the
general succession of phenomena, beginning with the development of order
out of chaos, and ending with the creation of man, Scripture would be
found to have anticipated or revealed what science confirms. It was
impossible, so theologians argued, that there could be aught else than
harmony between the divine works and the writings which were assumed to
be of divine origin. Science could not contradict revelation, and
whatever seemed contradictory was due to misapprehension either of the
natural fact, or to misreading of the written word. But although the
story of the creation might be clothed, as so exalted and moving a theme
warranted, in poetic form, that of the fall of Adam and of the drowning
of his descendants, eight persons excepted, must be taken in all its
appalling literalness. Confirmation of the Deluge story was found in
the fossil shells on high mountain tops; while as for the giants of
antediluvian times, there were the huge bones in proof. Some of these
relics of mastodon and mammoth were actually hung up in churches as
evidence that "there were giants in those days"! Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
tells of one Henrion, who published a book in 1718 giving the height of
Adam as one hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches, and of Eve as
one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches, Noah being of rather less
stature. But to parley with science is fatal to theology. Moreover,
arguments which involve the cause they support in ridicule may be left
to refute themselves. And while theology was hesitating, as in the
amusing example supplied by Dr. William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible
(published in 1863) wherein the reader, turning up the article "Deluge,"
is referred to "Flood," and thence to "Noah"; archæology produced the
Chaldæan original of the legend whence the story of the flood is
derived. With candour as commendable as it is rare, the Reverend
Professor Driver, from whom quotation has been made already, admits that
"read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates an
impression at variance with the facts revealed by science"; all efforts
at reconciliation being only "different modes of obliterating the
characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view which
it does not express."
While the ground in favour of the literal interpretation of Genesis was
being contested, an invading force, that had been gathering strength
with the years, was advancing in the shape of the science of Biology.
The workers therein fall into two classes: the one, represented by
Linnaeus and his school, applied themselves to the classifying and
naming of plants and animals; the other, represented by Cuvier and his
school, examined into structure and function. Anatomy made clear the
machinery: physiology the work which it did, and the conditions under
which the work was done. Then, through comparison of corresponding
organs and their functions in various life-forms, came growing
perception of their unity. But only to a few came gleams of that unity
as proof of common descent of plant and animal, for, save in scattered
hints of inter-relation between species, which occur from the time of
Lord Bacon onward, the theory of their immutability was dominant until
forty years ago.
Four men form the chief vanguard of the biological movement. "Modern
classificatory method and nomenclature have largely grown out of the
work of Linnaeus; the modern conception of biology, as a science, and
of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are as largely
rooted in the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and palæontology
owe a vast debt to Cuvier's results; while invertebrate zoology and the
revival of the idea of Evolution are intimately dependent on the results
of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology up
to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out of,
the works of these men."
Linnaeus, son of a Lutheran pastor, born at Roeshult, in Sweden, in
1707, had barely passed his twenty-fifth year before laying the
ground-plan of the system of classification which bears his name, a
system which advance in knowledge has since modified. Based on external
resemblances, its formulation was possible only to a mind intent on
minute and accurate detail, and less observant of general principles. In
brief, the work of Linnaeus was constructive, not interpretative. Hence,
perhaps, conjoined to the theological ideas then current, the reason
why the larger question of the fixity of species entered not into his
purview. To him each plant and animal retained the impress of the
Creative hand that had shaped it "in the beginning," and, throughout
his working life, he departed but slightly from the plan with which he
started, namely, "reckoning as many species as issued in pairs" from the
Almighty fiat.
Not so Buffon, born on his father's estate in Burgundy in the same year
as Linnaeus, whom he survived ten years, dying in 1788. His opinions,
clashing as they did with orthodox creeds, were given in a tentative,
questioning fashion, so that where ecclesiastical censure fell, retreat
was easier. As has been seen in his submission to the Sorbonne, he was
not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Perhaps he felt that the
ultimate victory of his opinions was sufficiently assured to make
self-sacrifice needless. But, under cover of pretence at inquiry, his
convictions are clear enough. He was no believer in the permanent
stability of species, and noted, as warrant of this, the otherwise
unexplained presence of aborted or rudimentary structures. For example,
he says, "the pig does not appear to have been formed upon an original,
special, and perfect plan, since it is a compound of other animals; it
has evidently useless parts, or rather, parts of which it cannot make
any use, toes, all the bones of which are perfectly formed, and which,
nevertheless, are of no service to it. Nature is far from subjecting
herself to final causes in the formation of her creatures." Then,
further, as showing his convictions on the non-fixity of species, he
says, how many of them, "being perfected or degenerated by the great
changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature, by
food, by the prolonged influences of climate, contrary or favourable,
are no longer what they formerly were." But he writes with an eye on the
Sorbonne when, hinting at a possible common ancestor of horse and ass,
and of ape and man, he slyly adds that since the Bible teaches the
contrary, the thing cannot be. Thus he attacked covertly; by adit, not
by direct assault; and to those who read between the lines there was
given a key wherewith to unlock the door to the solution of many
biological problems. Buffon, consequently, was the most stimulating and
suggestive naturalist of the eighteenth century. There comes between him
and Lamarck, both in order of time and sequence of ideas, Erasmus
Darwin, the distinguished grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Born at Eton, near Newark, in 1731, he walked the hospitals at London
and Edinburgh, and settled, for some years, at Lichfield, ultimately
removing to Derby. Since Lucretius, no scientific writer had put his
cosmogonic speculations into verse until Dr. Darwin made the heroic
metre, in which stereotyped form the poetry of his time was cast, the
vehicle of rhetorical descriptions of the amours of flowers and the
evolution of the thumb. The Loves of the Plants, ridiculed in the Loves
of the Triangles in the Anti-Jacobin, is not to be named in the same
breath, for stateliness of diction, and majesty of movement, as the De
rerum Natura. But both the prose work Zoonomia and the poem The Temple
of Nature (published after the author's death in 1802) have claim
to notice as the matured expression of conclusions at which the
clear-sighted, thoughtful, and withal, eccentric doctor had arrived in
the closing years of his life. Krause's Life and Study of the Works of
Erasmus Darwin supplies an excellent outline of the contents of books
which are now rarely taken down from the shelves, and makes clear that
their author had the root of the matter in him. His observations and
reading, for the influence of Buffon and others is apparent in his
writings, led him to reject the current belief in the separate creation
of species. He saw that this theory wholly failed to account for the
existence of abnormal forms, of adaptations of the structure of organs
to their work, of gradations between living things, and other features
inconsistent with the doctrine of "let lions be, and there were lions."
His shrewd comment on the preformation notion of development has been
quoted (p. 20). The substance of his argument in support of a "physical
basis of life" is as follows: "When we revolve in our minds the
metamorphosis of animals, as from the tadpole to the frog; secondly, the
changes produced by artificial cultivation, as in the breeds of horses,
dogs, and sheep; thirdly, the changes produced by conditions of climate
and of season, as in the sheep of warm climates being covered with hair
instead of wool, and the hares and partridges of northern climates
becoming white in winter; when, further, we observe the changes of
structure produced by habit, as seen especially by men of different
occupations; or the changes produced by artificial mutilation and
prenatal influences, as in the crossing of species and production of
monsters; fourth, when we observe the essential unity of plan in all
warm-blooded animals--we are led to conclude that they have been alike
produced from a similar living filament." The concluding words of this
extract make remarkable approach to the modern theory of the origin of
life in the complex jelly-like protoplasm, or, as some call it, nuclein
or nucleoplasm. And, on this, Erasmus Darwin further remarks: "As the
earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long
before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long
before other animals of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same
kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?"
Nor does he make any exception to this law of organic development. He
quotes Buffon and Helvetius to the effect--"that many features in the
anatomy of man point to a former quadrupedal position, and indicate that
he is not yet fully adapted to the erect position; that, further, man
may have arisen from a single family of monkeys, in which, accidentally,
the opposing muscle brought the thumb against the tips of the fingers,
and that this muscle gradually increased in size by use in successive
generations." While we who live in these days of fuller knowledge
of agents of variation may detect the _minus_ in all foregoing
speculations, our interest is increased in the thought of their near
approach to the cardinal discovery. And a rapid run through the later
writings of Dr. Darwin shows that there is scarcely a side of the great
theory of Evolution which has escaped his notice or suggestive comment.
Grant Allen, in his excellent little monograph on Charles Darwin, says
that the theory of "natural selection was the only cardinal one in the
evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did not actually forestall
his more famous and greater namesake. For its full perception, the
discovery of Malthus had to be collated with the speculations of
Buffon."
In the Historical Sketch on the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of
Species, which Darwin prefixed to his book, he refers to Lamarck as "the
first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention;"
rendering "the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability
of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being
the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." Lamarck was
born at Bezantin, in Picardy, in 1744. Intended for the Church, he
chose the army, but an injury resulting from a practical joke cut short
his career as a soldier. He then became a banker's clerk, in which
occupation he secured leisure for his favourite pursuit of natural
history. Through Buffon's influence he procured a civil appointment,
and ultimately became a colleague of Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in
the Museum of Natural History at Paris. Of Cuvier it will here suffice
to say that he remained to the end of his life a believer in special
creation, or, what amounts to the same thing, a series of special
creations which, he held, followed the catastrophic annihilations
of prior plants and animals. Although orthodox by conviction, his
researches told against his tenets, because his important work in the
reconstruction of skeletons of long extinct animals laid the foundation
of palæontology.
To Lamarck, says Haeckel, "will always belong the immortal glory of
having for the first time worked out the Theory of Descent as an
independent scientific theory of the first order, and as the
philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology." He taught
that in the beginnings of life only the very simplest and lowest
animals and plants came into existence; those of more complex structure
developing from these; man himself being descended from ape-like
mammals. For the Aristotelian mechanical figure of life as a ladder,
with its detached steps, he substituted the more appropriate figure of
a tree, as an inter-related organism. He argued that the course of the
earth's development, and also of all life upon it, was continuous, and
not interrupted by violent revolutions. In this he followed Buffon and
Hutton. Buffon, in his Theory of the Earth, argues that "in order to
understand what had taken place in the past, or what will happen in the
future, we have but to observe what is going on in the present." This
is the keynote of modern geology. "Life," adds Lamarck, "is a purely
physical phenomenon. All its phenomena depend on mechanical, physical,
and chemical causes which are inherent in the nature of matter itself."
He believed in a form of spontaneous generation. Rejecting Buffon's
theory of the direct action of the surroundings as agents of change in
living things, he sums up the causes of organic evolution in the
following propositions:
1. Life tends by its inherent forces to increase the volume of each
living body and of all its parts up to a limit determined by its own
needs.
2. New wants in animals give rise to new movements which produce organs.
3. The development of these organs is in proportion to their employment.
4. New developments are transmitted to offspring.
The second and third propositions were illustrated by examples which
have, with good reason, provoked ridicule. Lamarck accounts for the long
neck of the giraffe by that organ being continually stretched out to
reach the leaves at the tree-tops; for the long tongue of the ant-eater
or the woodpecker by these creatures protruding it to get at food in
channel or crevice; for the webbed feet of aquatic animals by the
outstretching of the membranes between the toes in swimming; and for the
erect position of man by the constant efforts of his ape-like ancestors
to keep upright. The legless condition of the serpent which, in the
legend of the Garden of Eden, is accounted for on moral grounds, is
thus explained by Lamarck: "Snakes sprang from reptiles with four
extremities, but having taken up the habit of moving along the earth and
concealing themselves among bushes, their bodies, owing to repeated
efforts to elongate themselves and to pass through narrow spaces, have
acquired a considerable length out of all proportion to their width.
Since long feet would have been very useless, and short feet would have
been incapable of moving their bodies, there resulted a cessation of use
of these parts, which has finally caused them to totally disappear,
although they were originally part of the plan of organization in these
animals." The discovery of an efficient cause of modifications, which
Lamarck refers to the efforts of the creatures themselves, has placed
his speculations in the museum of biological curiosities; but sharp
controversy rages to-day over the question raised in Lamarck's fourth
proposition, namely, the transmission of characters acquired by the
parent during its lifetime to the offspring. This burning question
between Weismann and his opponents, involving the serious problem of
heredity, will remain unsettled till a long series of observations
supply material for judgment.
Lamarck, poor, neglected, and blind in his old age, died in 1829. Both
Cuvier, who ridiculed him, and Goethe, who never heard of him, passed
away three years later. The year following his death, when Darwin was an
undergraduate at Cambridge, Lyell published his Principles of Geology,
a work destined to assist in paving the way for the removal of one
difficulty attending the solution of the theory of the origin of
species, namely, the vast period of time for the life-history of
the globe which that theory demands. As Lyell, however, was then a
believer--although, like a few others of his time, of wavering type--in
the fixity of species, he had other aims in view than those to which his
book contributed. But he wrote with an open mind, not being, as Herbert
Spencer says of Hugh Miller, "a theologian studying geology." Following
the theories of uniformity of action laid down by Hutton, by Buffon, and
by that industrious surveyor, William Smith, who travelled the length
and breadth of England, mapping out the sequence of the rocks, and
tabulating the fossils special to each stratum, Lyell demonstrated in
detail that the formation and features of the earth's crust are
explained by the operation of causes still active. He was one among
others, each working independently at different branches of research;
each, unwittingly, collecting evidence which would help to demolish old
ideas, and support new theories.
A year after the Principles of Geology appeared, there crept unnoticed
into the world a treatise, by one Patrick Matthew, on Naval Timber and
Arboriculture, under which unexciting title Darwin's theory was
anticipated. Of this, however, as of a still earlier anticipation, more
presently. About this period Von Baer, in examining the embryos of
animals, showed that creatures so unlike one another in their adult
state as fishes, lizards, lions, and men, resemble one another so
closely in the earlier stages of their development that no differences
can be detected between them. But Von Baer was himself anticipated by
Meckel, who wrote as follows in 1811: "There is no good physiologist who
has not been struck, incidentally, by the observation that the original
form of all organisms is one and the same, and that out of this one
form, all, the lowest as well as the highest, are developed in such a
manner that the latter pass through the permanent forms of the former as
transitory stages" (Osborn's From the Greeks to Darwin, p. 212). In
botany Conrad Sprengel, who belongs to the eighteenth century, had shown
the work effected by insects in the fertilization of plants. Following
his researches, Robert Brown made clear the mode of the development of
plants, and Sir William Hooker traced their habits and geographical
distribution. Von Mohl discovered that material basis of both plant and
animal which he named "protoplasm." In 1844, nine years before Von Mohl
told the story of the building-up of life from a seemingly structureless
jelly, a book appeared which critics of the time charged with "poisoning
the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of religion." This
was the once famous Vestiges of Creation, acknowledged after his death
as the work of Robert Chambers, in which the origin and movements of the
solar system were explained as determined by uniform laws, themselves
the expression of Divine power. Organisms, "from the simplest and
oldest, up to the highest and most recent," were the result of an
"inherent impulse imparted by the Almighty both to advance them from the
several grades and modify their structure as circumstances required."
Although now referred to only as "marking time" in the history of the
theory of Evolution, the book created a sensation which died away only
some years after its publication. Darwin remarks upon it in his
Historical Sketch that although displaying "in the earlier editions
little accurate knowledge and a great want of scientific knowledge, it
did excellent service in this country in calling attention to the
subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the
reception of analogous views."
Three years after the Vestiges, there was, although none then knew it,
or knowing the fact, would have admitted it, more "sapping of the
foundations" of orthodox belief, when M. Boucher de Perthes exhibited
some rudely-shaped flint implements which had been found at intervals in
hitherto undisturbed deposits of sand and gravel--old river beds--in the
Somme valley, near Abbeville, in Picardy. For these rough stone tools
and weapons, being of human workmanship, evidenced the existence of
savage races of men in Europe in a dim and dateless past, and went far
to refute the theories of his paradisiacal state on that memorable "23
October, 4004 B. C.," when, according to Dr. Lightfoot's reckoning (see
p. 103), Adam was created. While the pickaxe, in disturbing flint knives
and spearheads, that had lain for countless ages, was disturbing much
besides, English and German philosophers were formulating the imposing
theory which, under the name of the Conservation of Energy, makes clear
the indestructibility of both matter and motion. Then, to complete the
work of preparation effected by the discoveries now briefly outlined,
there appeared, in a now defunct newspaper, the Leader, in its issue of
20th of March, 1852, an article by Herbert Spencer on the Development
Hypothesis, in which the following striking passage occurs: "Those who
cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported
by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no
facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief,
they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume
that their own needs none. Here we find, scattered over the globe,
vegetable and animal organisms numbering, of the one kind (according to
Humboldt) some 320,000 species, and of the other, some 2,000,000 species
(see Carpenter); and if to these we add the numbers of animal and
vegetable species that have become extinct, we may safely estimate the
number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the earth, at
not less than _ten millions_. Well, which is the most rational theory
about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have
been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that by
continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions of
varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?...
Even could the supporters of the Development Hypothesis merely show
that the origination of species by the process of modification is
conceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents.
But they can do much more than this. They can show that the process of
modification has effected, and is effecting, decided changes in all
organisms subject to modifying influences.... They can show that in
successive generations these changes continue, until ultimately the new
conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated
plants, domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such
alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of
difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on
which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show,
too, that the changes daily taking place in ourselves--the facility that
attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when
practice ceases--the strengthening of passions habitually gratified, and
the weakening of those habitually curbed--the development of every
faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made of
it--are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show
that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying
influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific
differences; an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in
time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes--an
influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of
years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological
records imply, any amount of change."
This quotation shows, as perhaps no other reference might show, how, by
the middle of the present century, science was trembling on the verge of
discovery of that "modifying influence" of which Mr. Spencer speaks.
That discovery made clear how all that had preceded it not only
contributed thereto, but gained a significance and value which, apart
from it, could not have been secured. When the relation of the several
parts to the whole became manifest, each fell into its place like the
pieces of a child's puzzle map.
LEADING MEN OF SCIENCE.
A. D. 800 TO A. D. 1800.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
| Place and date | |
NAME. | of birth. | Died.| Speciality.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
Geber (Djafer). |Mesopotamia, | .... |Earliest known Chemist.
| 830. | |
Avicenna (Ibu Sina).|Bokhara, 980. | 1037 |Expositor of Aristotle;
| | | Physician and
| | | Geologist.
Averroes (Ibu |Spain, 1126. | 1198 |Translator and
Roshd). | | | Commentator of
| | | Aristotle.
Roger Bacon. |Ilchester, 1214. | 1292 |First English
| | | Experimentalist.
Christopher |Genoa, 1445. | 1506 |Discoverer of America,
Columbus. | | | 1492.
Vasco de Gama. |Sines, 1469. | 1525 |Sailed round the South
|(Portugal.) | | of Africa, 1497.
Ferdinand Magellan. |Ville de | 1521 |Circumnavigator of
| Sabroza, 1470. | | the Globe, 1519.
Nicholas Copernicus.|Thorn, 1473. | 1543 |Discoverer of the Sun
|(Prussia.) | | as the Centre of our
| | | System.
Andreas Vesalius. |Brussels, 1514. | 1564 |Human Anatomist.
Conrad Gesner. |Zurich, 1516. | 1565 |Classification of
| | | Plants and Animals.
Andrew Caesalpino. |Arezzo, 1519. | 1603 |Comparative Botanist.
|(Tuscany.) | |
Tycho Brahe. |Knudstrup, | 1601 |Collector of
| 1546. | | Astronomical Data.
|(Sweden.) | |
Giordano Bruno. |Nola, 1550. | 1600 |Expounder of the
| | | Copernican System
| | | and Philosopher.
Francis, Lord Bacon.|London, 1561. | 1626 |Expounder of the
| | | Inductive Philosophy.
Galileo Galilei. |Pisa, 1564. | 1642 |Numerous Astronomical
| | | Discoveries.
Johann Kepler. |Würtemburg, | 1630 |Discoverer of the
| 1571. | | Three Laws of
| | | Planetary Movements.
Thomas Hobbes. |Malmesbury, | 1679 |One of the Founders
| 1588. | | of Modern Ethics.
René Descartes. |La Haye, 1596. | 1650 |Resolution of all
|(Touraine.) | | Phenomena into Terms
| | | of Matter and Motion.
| | | (Dualism.)
Benedict Spinoza. |Amsterdam, | 1677 |Resolution of all
| 1632. | | Phenomena into Terms
| | | of Substance=God.
| | | (Monism.)
John Locke. |Wrington, 1632. | 1704 |Moral Philosopher.
|(Somerset.) | |
Gottfrid Wilhelm |Leipsic, 1646. | 1716 |Philosopher and
Leibnitz. | | | Mathematician.
Sir Isaac Newton. |Woolsthorpe, | 1727 |Expounder of the Law
| 1642. | | of Gravitation.
|(Lincoln.) | |
Edmund Halley. |London, 1656. | 1741 |Astronomer.
David Hartley. |Illingworth, | 1757 |Psychology of Man.
| 1705. | |
Carl von Linnaeus. |Roeshult, 1707. | 1778 |Systematic Botany and
|(Sweden.) | | Zoology.
Count de Buffon. |Burgundy, | 1788 |Contributions from
| 1707. | | Biology toward Theory
| | | of Evolution and
| | | Geology.
David Hume. |Edinburgh, | 1776 |Philosophy of the
| | | Anti-supernatural;
| 1711. | | all Science Converging
| | | in Man.
Immanuel Kant. |Königsberg, | 1804 |Formulator of the
| 1724. | | Nebular Theory.
James Hutton. |Edinburgh, | 1797 |Geologist:
| 1726. | | Uniformitarian.
Erasmus Darwin. |Elton, 1731. | 1802 |(_See_ BUFFON.)
|(Lincolnshire.) | |
Sir William |Hanover, 1738. | 1822 |Astronomer.
Herschel. | | |
Jean Baptiste |Bazantium, | 1829 |Biologist: Contributions
Lamarck. | 1744. | | against fixity
| | | of Species.
Marquis de Laplace. |Beaumont-en-Ange,| 1827 |Expounder of the
| 1749. | | Nebular Theory.
Conrad Sprengel. |Pomerania, | 1833 |Botanist.
| 1766. | |
John Dalton. |Eaglesfield, | 1844 |Formulator of the
| 1767. | | Modern Atomic
|(Cumberland.) | | Theory.
Baron Cuvier. |Montbeliard, | 1832 |Palæontologist and
| 1769. | | Anatomist.
Geoff. St. Hilaire. |Etampes, 1772. | 1844 |Zoologist.
Alexander von | Berlin, 1769. | 1859 |Explorer.
Humboldt. | | |
William Smith. |Churchill, 1769. | 1840 |Geologist: mapped
|(Oxon.) | | Strata of Great
| | | Britain.
Boucher de Perthes. |1788. | 1868 |Discoverer of Evidences
| | | of Man's
| | | Antiquity.
Sir William Hooker. |Norwich, 1785. | 1865 |Botanist.
Sir Charles Lyell. |Kinnordy, | 1875 |Geologist: developed
| 1797. | | Hutton's Theory.
|(Forfarshire.) | |
Ernst von Baer. |Esthonia, 1792. | 1876 |Embryologist: Law of
| | | Organic Development.
Sir Richard Owen. |Lancaster, 1804. | 1892 |Palæontologist.
Hugo von Mohl. |Germany, 1805. | 1872 |Discoverer of
| | | Protoplasm.
Theodor Schwann. |Neuss, 1810. | 1882 |Founder of the Cell
|(Prussia.) | | Theory.
Hermann von |Potsdam, 1821. | 1894 |Formulator of the
Helmholtz. | | | Doctrine of the
| | | Conservation of
| | | Energy.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
_PART IV._
MODERN EVOLUTION.
1. _Darwin and Wallace._
We have to deal with Man as a product of Evolution; with Society as
a product of Evolution; and with Moral Phenomena as products of
Evolution.--HERBERT SPENCER, Principles of Ethics, § 193.
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN (the second name was rarely used by him) was born
at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809. He came of a long line of
Lincolnshire yeomen, whose forbears spelt the name variously, as Darwen,
Derwent, and Darwynne, perhaps deriving it from the river of kindred
name. His father was a kindly, prosperous doctor, of sufficient
scientific reputation to secure his election into the Royal Society,
although that coveted honour was then more easily obtained than now. Of
the more famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the reminder suffices that
both his prose and poetry were vehicles of suggestive speculations on
the development of life-forms. Dealing with bald facts and dates for
clearance of what follows, it may be added that Charles Darwin was
educated at the Grammar School of his native town; that he passed thence
to Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities; was occupied as volunteer
naturalist on board the Beagle from December, 1831, till October,
1836; that he published his epoch-making Origin of Species in November,
1859; and that he was buried by the side of Sir Isaac Newton in
Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April, 1882.
[Illustration: Alfred R. Wallace]
As with not a few other men of "light and leading," neither school nor
university did much for him, nor did his boyhood give indication of
future greatness. In his answers to the series of questions addressed to
various scientific men in 1873 by his distinguished cousin, Francis
Galton, he says: "I consider that all I have learnt of any value has
been self-taught," and he adds that his education fostered no methods of
observation or reasoning. Of the Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, after
the death of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated
potter), in his ninth year, he was placed as a boarder till his
sixteenth year, he tells us, in the modest and candid Autobiography
printed in the Life and Letters, "nothing could have been worse for the
development of my mind." All that he was taught were the classics, and
a little ancient geography and history; no mathematics, and no modern
languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for natural history and for
collecting, his spoils including not only shells and plants, but also
coins and seals. When the fact that he helped his brother in chemical
experiments became known to Dr. Butler, the head-master, that desiccated
pedagogue publicly rebuked him "for wasting time on such useless
subjects." Then his father, angry at finding that he was doing no good
at school, reproved him for caring for nothing but shooting, dogs, and
rat-catching, and declared that he would be a disgrace to the family! He
sent him to Edinburgh University with his brother to study medicine, but
Darwin found the dulness of the lectures intolerable, and the sight of
blood sickened him, as it did his father. Although the effect of the
"incredibly" dry lectures on geology made him--the future Secretary of
the Geological Society!--vow never to read a book on the science, or in
any way study it, his interest in biological subjects grew, and its
first fruits were shown in a paper read before the Plinian Society at
Edinburgh in 1826, in which he reported his discovery that the so-called
ova of _Flustra_, or the sea-mat, were larvæ.
But his father had to accept the fact that Darwin disliked the idea of
being a doctor, and fearing that he would degenerate into an idle
sporting man, proposed that he should become a clergyman! Darwin says
upon this:--
I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard
or thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief
in all the dogmas of the Church of England, though otherwise I liked
the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with
care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity; and,
as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of
every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must
be fully accepted. Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by
the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a
clergyman. Nor was this intention and my father's wish ever
formally given up, but died a natural death when, on leaving
Cambridge, I joined the Beagle as naturalist. If the phrenologists
are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a
clergyman. A few years ago the secretaries of a German psychological
society asked me earnestly by letter for a photograph of myself; and
some time afterwards I received the proceedings of one of the
meetings, in which it seemed that the shape of my head had been the
subject of a public discussion, and one of the speakers declared
that I had the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests.
The result was that early in 1828 Darwin went to Cambridge, the three
years spent at which were "time wasted, as far as the academical studies
were concerned." His passion for shooting and hunting led him into
a sporting, card-playing, drinking company, but science was his
redemption. No pursuit gave him so much pleasure as collecting beetles,
of his zeal in which the following is an example: "One day, on tearing
off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand;
then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I
popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it
ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was
forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one."
Happily for his future career, and therefore for the interests of
science, Darwin became intimate with men like Whewell, Henslow, and
Sedgwick, while the reading of Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and of Sir
John Herschel's Introduction to Natural Philosophy, stirred up in him
"a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble
structure of Natural Science." The vow to eschew geology was quickly
broken when he came under the spell of Sedgwick's influence, but it
was the friendship of Henslow that determined his after career, and
prevented him from becoming the "Rev. Charles Darwin." For on his return
from a geological tour in Wales with Sedgwick he found a letter from
Henslow awaiting him, the purport of which is in the following
extract:--
"I have been asked by Peacock (Lowndean Professor of Astronomy at
Cambridge) to recommend him a naturalist as companion to Captain
Fitz-Roy, employed by Government to survey the southern extremity of
America. I have stated that I consider you to be the best-qualified
person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation."
In connection with this the following memorandum from Darwin's
pocket-book of 1831 is of interest:--"Returned to Shrewsbury at end of
August. Refused offer of voyage."
This refusal was given at the instance of his father, who objected
to the scheme as "wild and unsettling, and as disreputable to his
character as a clergyman"; but he soon yielded on the advice of his
brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, and on Darwin's plea that he "should
be deuced clever to spend more than his allowance whilst on board the
Beagle." On this his father answered with a smile, "But they tell me
you are very clever." It is amusing to find that Darwin narrowly escaped
being rejected by Fitz-Roy, who, as a disciple of Lavater, doubted
whether a man with such a nose as Darwin's "could possess sufficient
energy and determination for the voyage."
The details of that voyage, the first of the two memorable events in
Darwin's otherwise unadventurous life, are set down in delightful
narrative in his Naturalist's Voyage Round the World, and it will
suffice to quote a passage from the autobiography bearing on the
significance of the materials collected during his five years' absence.
During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by
discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered
with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the
manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in
proceeding southwards over the continent; and thirdly, by the South
American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos
Archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ
slightly on each island of the group, none of the islands appearing
to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident that such
facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on
the supposition that species gradually became modified; and the
subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that "none of the
evolutionary theories then current in the scientific world" could
account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind
are beautifully adapted to their habits of life.... I had always
been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be
explained, it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to prove by
indirect evidence that species have been modified.... In October,
1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic
inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and
being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which
everywhere goes on, from long-continued observations of the habits
of plants and animals, it at once struck me that under these
circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and
unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the
formation of new species.
Shortly after his return he settled in London, prepared his journal and
manuscripts of observations for publication, and opened, he says, under
date of July, 1837, "my first note-book for facts in relation to the
origin of species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased
working for the next twenty years." He acted for two years as one of the
honorary secretaries of the Geological Society, which brought him into
close relations with Lyell, and, as his health then allowed him to go
into society, he saw a good deal of prominent literary and scientific
contemporaries.
In the autumn of 1842, two years and eight months after his marriage
with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who died in October last (1896),
Darwin removed from London, the air and social demands of which were
alike unsuited to his health, and finally fixed upon a house in the
secluded village of Down, near Beckenham, where he spent the rest of his
days. Henceforth the life of Darwin is merged in the books in which,
from time to time, he gave the result of his long years of patient
observation and inquiry, from the epoch-making Origin to the monograph
on earthworms. With bad health, apparently due to gouty tendencies
aggravated by chronic sea-sickness during his voyage; with nights that
never gave unbroken sleep; and days that were never passed without
prostrating pain; he might well have felt justified in doing nothing
whatever. But he was saved from the accursed monotony of a wealthy
invalid's life by his insatiate delight in searching for that solution
of the problem of the mutability of species which time would not fail to
bring. In this, he tells us, he forgot his "daily discomfort," and thus
was delivered from morbid introspection.
Darwin worked at his rough notes on the variation of animals and plants
under domestication, adding facts collected by "printed enquiries, by
conversations with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive
reading," gleams of light coming till he says that he is "almost
convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder)
immutable." But he was still groping in the dark as to the application
of selection to wild plants and animals, until, as remarked above, the
chance reading of Malthus suggested a working theory. A brief sketch of
this theory, written out in pencil in 1842, was elaborated in 1844 into
an essay of two hundred and thirty pages. The importance attached to
this was shown in a letter which Darwin then addressed to his wife,
charging her, in the event of his death, to apply £400 to the expense of
publication. He also named certain competent men from whom an editor
might be chosen, preference being given to Sir Charles (then Mr. Lyell,
at whose advice Darwin began to write out his views on a scale three or
four times as extensive as that in which they appeared in the Origin of
Species.) Their publication in an abstract form was hastened by the
receipt, in June, 1858, of a paper, containing "exactly the same
theory," from Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace at Ternate in the Moluccas. This
reference to that distinguished explorer, will, before the story of the
coincident discovery is further told, fitly introduce a sketch of his
career.
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the 8th of
January, 1823. He was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in his
fourteenth year began the study of land-surveying and architecture under
an elder brother. Quick-witted and observing, he studied a great deal
more on his own account in his journeyings over England and Wales,
the results of which abide in the wide range of subjects--scientific,
political, and social--engaging his active pen from early manhood to the
present day.
About 1844 he exchanged the theodolite for the ferule, and became
English master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, in which town he
found a congenial friend in the person of his future fellow-traveller,
Henry Walter Bates. Bates was then employed in his father's hosiery
warehouse, from which he escaped, as often as the long working hours
then prevailing allowed, into the fields with his collecting-box. Both
schoolmaster and shopman were ardent naturalists, Mr. Wallace, as he
tells us, being at that time "chiefly interested in botany," but he
afterward took up his friend's favourite pursuit of entomology. The
writer, when preparing his memoir of Bates (which prefaces a reprint of
the first edition of the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons), learned
from Mr. Wallace that in early life he did not keep letters from Bates
and other correspondents. But, fortunately, among Bates's papers, there
was a bundle of interesting letters from Wallace written between June,
1845, and October, 1847, from Neath, in South Wales, to which town he
had removed. In one of these, dated the 9th of November, 1845, Wallace
asks Bates if he had read the Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation, and a subsequent letter indicates that Bates had not formed a
favourable opinion of the book. A later letter is interesting as
conveying an estimate of Darwin. "I first," Wallace says, "read Darwin's
Journal three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the
journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt's
Personal Narrative; as a work of general interest, perhaps supporter to
it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell's
views. His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour,
affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought."
But, of still greater moment, is a letter in which Wallace tells Bates
that he begins "to feel dissatisfied with a mere local collection. I
should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally
with a view to the theory of the origin of species." The two friends had
often discussed schemes for going abroad to explore some virgin region,
nor could their scanty means prevent the fulfilment of a scheme which
has enriched both science and the literature of travel. The choice of
country to explore was settled by Wallace's perusal of a little book
entitled A Voyage up the River Amazons, including a Residence in Pará,
by W. H. Edwards, an American tourist, published in Murray's Family
Library, in 1847. In the autumn of that year Wallace proposed a joint
expedition to the river Amazons for the purpose of exploring the Natural
History of its banks; the plan being to make a collection of objects,
dispose of the duplicates in London to pay expenses, and gather facts,
as Mr. Wallace expressed it in one of his letters, "towards solving the
problem of the origin of species."
The choice was a happy one, for, except by the German zoologist Von
Spix, and the botanist Von Martius in 1817-20, and subsequently by Count
de Castelnau, no exploration of a region so rich and interesting to the
biologist had been attempted. Early in 1848 Bates and Wallace met in
London to study South American animals and plants in the principal
collections, and afterward went to Chatsworth to gain information about
orchids, which they proposed to collect in the moist tropical forests
and send home.
On 26th of April, 1848, they embarked at Liverpool in a barque of only
192 tons burden, one of the few ships then trading to Pará, to which
seaport of the Amazons region a swift passage, "straight as an arrow,"
brought them on 28th of May.
The travellers soon settled in a _rocinha_, or country-house, a mile and
half from Pará, and close to the forest, which came down to their doors.
Like other towns along the Amazons, Pará stands on ground cleared from
the forest that stretches, a well-nigh pathless jungle of luxuriant
primeval vegetation, two thousand miles inland. In that paradise of the
naturalist, the collectors gathered consignments which met with ready
sale in London, and thus spent a couple of years in pursuits moderately
remunerative and wholly pleasurable, till, on reaching Barra, at the
mouth of the Rio Negro, one thousand miles from Pará, in March, 1850,
Bates and Wallace, who was accompanied by his younger brother, parted
company, "finding it more convenient to explore separate districts and
collect independently." Wallace took the northern parts and tributaries
of the Amazons, and Bates kept to the main stream, which, from the
direction it seems to take at the fork of the Rio Negro, is called the
Upper Amazons or the Solimoens. Different in character and climatic
conditions from the Lower Amazons, it flows through a "vast plain about
a thousand miles in length, and five hundred or six hundred miles in
breadth covered with one uniform, lofty, impervious, and humid forest."
Bates stayed in the country till June, 1859, but Wallace left in 1852,
and in the following year published an account of his journey under the
title of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. That book was written
under the serious disadvantage of the destruction of the greater part of
the notes and specimens by the burning of the ship in which Mr. Wallace
took passage on his homeward voyage. That it remains one of the select
company of works of travel for which demand is continuous is evidenced
in a reprint which appeared in 1891. If it affords few hints of the
author's bent of mind toward the question of the origin of species, it
shows what interest was being aroused within him over the allied subject
of the geographical distribution of plants and animals which Mr. Wallace
was to make so markedly his own.
In 1854 he sailed for the Malay Archipelago, where nearly eight years
were spent in exploring the region from Sumatra to New Guinea. The large
and varied outcome of that labour was embodied in numerous papers
communicated to learned societies and scientific journals, and in a
series of delightful books from The Malay Archipelago, first published
in 1869, to Island Life, published in 1880. Among the minor results
of his extensive travels--for all else that Wallace did pales before
the great discovery which links his name with Darwin's--was the
establishment of a line, known as "Wallace's," which divides the Malay
Archipelago into two main groups, "Indo-Malaysia and Austro-Malaysia,
marked by distinct species and groups of animals." That line runs
through a deep channel separating the islands of Bali and Lombok; the
plants and animals on which, although but fifteen miles of water
separate them, differ from each other even more than do the islands of
Great Britain and Japan. "A similar line, but somewhat farther east,
divides on the whole the Malay from the Papuan races of man."
Among the more fugitive contributions which mark Mr. Wallace's approach
to a solution of the problem in quest of which he and Bates went to the
Amazons is a paper On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of
New Species, published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History,
1855. In this he shows that some form of evolution of one species from
another is needed to explain the geological and geographical facts of
which examples are given.
In the interesting preface to the reprint of the famous paper On the
Tendencies of Varieties to depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,
Mr. Wallace recites the several researches which he made in quest of
that "form" till, when lying ill with fever at Ternate, in February,
1858, something led him to think of the "positive checks" described by
Malthus in his Essay on Population, a book which he had read some years
before. Oddly enough, therefore, the honours lie with the maligned
Haileybury Reverend Professor of Political Economy in furnishing both
Darwin and Wallace with the clue. The "positive checks"--war, disease,
famine--Wallace felt must act even more effectively on the lower animals
than on man, because of their more rapid rate of multiplication. And he
tells us, in the prefatory note to a reprint of his paper, "there
suddenly flashed on me the _idea_ of the survival of the fittest, and in
the two hours that elapsed before my ague fit was over I had thought out
the whole of the theory, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out
in full and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin," asking him, if he
thought well of the essay, to send it to Lyell. This Darwin did with the
following remarks: "Your words have come true with a vengeance--that I
should be forestalled.... I never saw a more striking coincidence; if
Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a
better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.
Please return me the MS., which he does not say he wishes me to
publish; but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to
any journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be
smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be
deteriorated, as all the labour consists in the application of the
theory." Darwin came out well in this business. For to have hit upon a
theory which interprets so large a question as the origin and causes of
modification of life-forms; to keep on turning it over and over again in
the mind for twenty long years; to spend the working hours of every day
in collection and verification of facts for and against it; and then to
have another man launching a "bolt from the blue" in the shape of a
paper with exactly the same theory, might well disturb even a
philosopher of Darwin's serenity.
However, both Hooker and Lyell had read his sketch a dozen years before,
and it was arranged by them, not as considering claims of priority,
which have too often been occasion of unworthy wrangling, but in the
"interests of science generally," that an abstract of Darwin's
manuscript should be read with Wallace's paper at a meeting of the
Linnæan Society on the 1st of July, 1858. The full title of the joint
communication was On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties, and on
the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Selection. Sir
Joseph Hooker, describing the gathering, says that "the interest excited
was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old
school to enter the lists before armouring. After the meeting it was
talked over with bated breath. Lyell's approval, and perhaps, in a small
way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows,
who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too,
the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors and their theme."
Nothing can deprive Mr. Wallace of the honour due to him as the
co-originator of the theory, which, regarded in its application to the
origin, history, and destiny of man, involves the most momentous changes
in belief, and there may be fitly quoted here his own modest and,
doubtless, correct, assessment of limitations which in no wise
invalidate his high claims. In the Preface to his Contributions to the
Theory of Natural Selection (1870), Mr. Wallace says the book will prove
that he both saw at the time the value and scope of the law which he had
discovered, and has since been able to apply to some purpose in a few
original lines of investigation. "But," he adds, "here my claims cease.
I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction
that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not
left for me to attempt to write the Origin of Species. I have long since
measured my own strength, and know full well that it would be quite
unequal to that task. Far abler men than myself may confess that they
have not that untiring patience in accumulating, and that wonderful
skill in using, large masses of facts of the most varied kind--that wide
and accurate physiological knowledge--that acuteness in devising and
skill in carrying out experiments, and that admirable style of
composition at once clear, persuasive, and judicial--qualities which, in
their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as the man, perhaps of
all men now living, best fitted for the great work he has undertaken
and accomplished."
In a letter to Wallace dated 20th April, 1870, Darwin says, "There has
never been passed on me, or, indeed, on any one, a higher eulogium than
yours. I wish that I fully deserved it. Your modesty and candour are
very far from new to me. I hope it is a satisfaction to you to
reflect--and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to
me--that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in
one sense rivals. I believe I can say this of myself with truth, and I
am absolutely sure it is true of you."
* * * * *
But on one question, and that round which discussion still rages, the
friends were poles asunder. There had been correspondence between them
as to the bearing of the theory of natural selection on man, and in
April, 1869, Darwin wrote, "As you expected, I differ grievously from
you, and I am very sorry for it. I can see no necessity for calling in
an additional and proximate cause in regard to man." In the fifteenth
chapter of his comprehensive book on Darwinism, Wallace admits the
action of natural selection in man's physical structure. This structure
classes him among the vertebrates; the mode of human suckling classes
him among the mammals; his blood, his muscles, and his nerves, the
structure of his heart with its veins and arteries, his lungs and his
whole respiratory and circulatory systems, all closely correspond to
those of other mammals, and are often almost identical with them. He
possesses the same number of limbs, terminating in the same number of
digits, as belong fundamentally to the mammals. His senses are identical
with theirs, and his organs of sense are the same in number and occupy
the same relative position. Every detail of structure which is common to
the mammalia as a class is found also in man, while he differs from
them only in such ways and degrees as the various species or groups of
mammals differ from each other. He is, like them, begotten by sexual
conjugation; like them, developed from a fertilized egg, and in his
embryonic condition passes through stages recapitulating the variety of
enormously remote ancestors of whom he is the perfected descendant.
Full-grown, he appears as most nearly allied to the anthropoid or
man-like apes; so much does his skeleton resemble theirs that, comparing
him with the chimpanzee, we find, with very few exceptions, bone for
bone, differing only in size, arrangement, and proportion.
Mr. Wallace, therefore, rejected the idea of man's special creation "as
being entirely unsupported by facts, as well as in the highest degree
improbable." _But he would not allow that natural selection explains the
origin of man's spiritual and intellectual nature._ These, he argues,
"must have had another origin, and for this origin we can only find an
adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit." More detailed
treatment of this argument will be given further on; here reference is
made to it as furnishing the explanation why Mr. Wallace kept not his
"first estate," and dropped out of the ranks of Pioneers of Evolution.
Many subjects, as hinted above, have occupied his facile pen--land
nationalization, causes of depression in trade, labourers' allotments,
vaccination, _et hoc genus omne_; showing, at least, the prominence
which all social matters occupy in the minds of the leading exponents of
the theory of Evolution. For of this, as will be seen, both Herbert
Spencer and Huxley supply cogent examples in their application of that
theory to human interests. But it is as a defender, although on lines of
his own not wholly orthodox, of supernaturalism, with attendant beliefs
in miracles and the grosser forms of spiritualism, that Mr. Wallace
appears in the character of opponent to the inclusion of man's psychical
nature as a product of Evolution.
The arresting influence of these views when backed by honest, sincere,
and eminent men of the type of Mr. Wallace, and when also supported by
several prominent men of science, renders it desirable to show that
modern psychism is but savage animism "writ large," and wholly
explicable on the theory of continuity. In his book on Miracles and
Modern Spiritualism, of which a revised edition, with chapters on
Apparitions and Phantasms, was issued in 1895, Mr. Wallace contends that
"Spiritualism, if true, furnishes such proofs of the existence of
ethereal beings and of their power to act upon matter, as must
revolutionise philosophy. It demonstrates the actuality of forms of
matter and modes of being before inconceivable; it demonstrates mind
without brain, and intelligence disconnected from what we know as the
material body; and it thus cuts away all presumption against our
continued existence after the physical body is disorganised and
dissolved. Yet more, it demonstrates, as completely as the fact can be
demonstrated, that the so-called dead are still alive; that our friends
are still with us, though unseen, and guide and strengthen us when,
owing to absence of proper conditions, they cannot make their presence
known. It thus furnishes a _proof_ of a future life which so many crave,
and for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt, so many in
positive disbelief. It substitutes a definite, real, and practical
conviction for a vague, theoretical, and unsatisfying faith. It
furnishes actual knowledge on a matter of vital importance to all men,
and as to which the wisest men and most advanced thinkers have held, and
still hold, that no knowledge was attainable."
This claim, this tremendous claim, on behalf of the phenomena of
spiritualism to supply an answer to "the question of questions; the
ascertainment of man's relation to the universe of things; whence our
race has come; to what goal we are tending," rests on the assumption
with which Mr. Wallace starts, "Spiritualism, _if true_."
The essay from which the above passages are quoted is preceded by
references in detail to a considerable number of cases of "the
appearance of preterhuman or spiritual beings," the evidence of which
"is as good and definite as it is possible for any evidence of any fact
to be." These ghost-stories, contrasted with the full-flavoured eerie
tales of old, are feebly monotonous. The apparatus of the medium is
limited: the phenomena are largely of the "horse-play" order. Through
the whole series we vainly seek for some ennobling and exalting
conception of a life beyond, some glimpses "behind the veil," only to
find that the shades are but diluted or vulgarized parodies of
ourselves; or that "the filthy are filthy still," like the departed
bargee whose "communicating intelligence" (we quote from a recent book
on spiritualism entitled The Great Secret) was as coarse-mouthed as when
in the flesh. In considering, if it be deemed worth while, the evidence
of genuineness of the occurrences, we are thrown, not on the honesty,
but on the competency of the witnesses. The most eminent among these
show themselves persons of undisciplined emotions. The distinguished
physicist, Professor Oliver Lodge, who has been described to the writer
by an intimate friend of the Professor as "longing to believe
something," argues that in dealing with psychical phenomena, a hazy,
muzzy state of mind is better than a mind "keenly awake" and "on the
spot" (see Address to the Society for Psychical Research, Proceedings,
part xxvi, pp. 14, 15). With this may be compared a Mohammedan receipt
for summoning spirits given in Klunzinger's Upper Egypt (p. 386): "Fast
seven days in a lonely place, and take incense with you. Read a chapter
1001 times from the Koran. That is the secret, and you will see
indescribable wonders; drums will be beaten beside you, and flags
hoisted over your head, and you will see spirits." Thus have the dreamy
Oriental Moslem and the self-hypnotized Western professor met together
to elicit truth from trance.
Concerning the competence of Mr. Wallace himself to weigh, unbiassed,
the evidence which comes before him, it suffices to cite the case of
Eusapia Paladino, a Neapolitan "medium," who, in the words of one of
her most ardent dupes, became "the unexpected instrument of driving
conviction as to the reality of psychical manifestations by the
invisible into the minds of many scientists." A number of distinguished
savants testified to the genuineness of the woman's performances in
Professor Richet's cottage on the Ile Roubant in the autumn of 1893. It
was the serious and complete conviction of all of them (Lodge, Richet,
Ochorowicz, and others) that "on no single occasion during the
occurrence of an event recorded by them was a hand of Eusapia's
free to execute any trick whatever." Mr. Maskelyne, such testimony
notwithstanding, declared that the whole business was "the sorriest of
trickeries," and, to the credit of the Society for Psychical Research,
it undertook the expense of bringing Eusapia to England for the purpose
of testing the genuineness of her doings. She was taken to a house in
Cambridge, and detected as a vulgar impostor. Yet Mr. Wallace, in the
new edition of his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, describes all the
phenomena occurring at Professor Richet's house as "not explicable
as the result of any known physical causes," and, in a subsequent
explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle of 24th of January, 1896,
expresses the opinion that "the Cambridge experiments, so far as they
are recorded, only prove that Eusapia _might_ have deceived, not that
she actually and _consciously_ did so." The integrity of Mr. Wallace is
not to be doubted, but what becomes of his competence to judge when
prejudice blinds itself to facts? Spiritualism, _if true_, demonstrates
this and that about the unseen; but spiritualism, _proved to be untrue_,
lacks half the dexterity of an astute conjurer, and the whole of
his honesty. Every scientific man recognises the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy as a fundamental canon. But with those who regard
the phenomena of Spiritualism as "not explicable" except by supernatural
causes, it would seem that that doctrine, as also the not unimportant
conditions of Time and Space, count for nothing. When we read their
reports of the behaviour of mediums who project (of course, in the dark)
"abnormal temporary prolongations" like pseudopodia, we should feel
alike depressed and confounded were there not abundant proofs what
wholly untrustworthy observers scientific specialists can be outside
their own domain. As the writer has remarked elsewhere, minds of this
type must be built in water-tight compartments. They show how, even in
the higher culture, the force of a dominant idea may suspend or
narcotize the reason and judgment, and contribute to the rise and spread
of another of the epidemic delusions of which history supplies warning
examples.
They also show that man's senses have been his arch-deceivers, and his
preconceptions their abettors, throughout human history; that advance
has been possible only as he has escaped through the discipline of the
intellect from the illusive impressions about phenomena which the senses
convey. Upon this matter the words of the late Dr. Carpenter may be
quoted, words the more weighty because they are the utterance of a man
whose philosophy was influenced by deep religious convictions: "With
every disposition to accept facts when I could once clearly satisfy
myself that they were facts, I have had to come to the conclusion that
whenever I have been permitted to employ such tests as I should employ
in any scientific investigation, there was either intentional deception
on the part of interested persons, or else self-deception on the part
of persons who were very sober-minded and rational upon all ordinary
affairs of life." He adds further: "It has been my business lately to
inquire into the mental condition of some of the individuals who have
reported the most remarkable occurrences. I cannot--it would not be
fair--say all I could with regard to that mental condition; but I can
only say this, that it all fits in perfectly well with the result of my
previous studies upon the subject, viz., that there is nothing too
strange to be believed by those who have once surrendered their judgment
to the extent of accepting as credible things which common sense tells
us are entirely incredible."
The fact abides that the great mass of supernatural beliefs which have
persisted from the lower culture till now, and which are still held by
an overwhelming majority of civilized mankind, are referable to causes
concomitant with man's mental development: causes operative throughout
his history. The low intellectual environment of his barbaric past
was constant for thousands of years, and his adaptation thereto was
complete. The intrusion of the scientific method in its application to
man disturbed that equilibrium. But this, as yet, only superficially.
Like the foraminifera that persist in the ocean depths, the great
majority of mankind have remained, but slightly, if at all, modified;
thus illustrating the truth of the doctrine of evolution in their
psychical history. (For that doctrine does not imply all-round
continuous advance. "Let us never forget," Mr. Spencer says in Social
Statics, "that the law is--adaptation to circumstances, be they what
they may.") Therefore the superstitions that still dominate the life of
man, even in so-called civilized centres, are no stumbling-blocks to
us. They are supports along the path of inquiry, because we account for
their persistence. Thought and feeling have a common base, because man
is a unit, not a duality. But the exercise of the one has been active
from the beginnings of his history--indeed we know not at what point
backward we can classify it as human or quasi-human--while the other,
speaking comparatively, has but recently been called into play. So far
as its influence on the modern World goes, may we not say that it began
at least in the domain of scientific naturalism with the Ionian
philosophers? Emotionally, we are hundreds of thousands of years old;
rationally, we are embryos.