In what he achieved Darwin is so entirely alone that his place in the
history of ideas is next to Aristotle, the great Greek biologist and
philosopher who preceded him by over two thousand years.
The biographers of Lincoln are at a loss to explain his greatness
through heredity. Darwin belonged to an able family, and his ancestors
are singularly prophetic of his career. He was near of kin to Francis
Galton, who shares with Weismann the leadership in the study of heredity
during the nineteenth century. By a happy combination of all the best
traits of the best of his ancestors coupled with the no less happy
omission of other traits, Darwin was a far greater man than any of his
forebears. Kindliness, truthfulness and love of nature were part of his
birthright. From his grandfather Erasmus, Charles may have inherited
especially his vividness of imagination and his strong tendency to
generalize. Countless hypotheses flitted through his mind. “Without
speculation there is no good and original observation,” he wrote to
Wallace. Still more interesting is the fact that the inheritance of his
grandfather’s tendency toward speculation took the direction of
evolution, for before the close of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin
gave the world in poetical form his belief in a complete evolutionary
system as well as the first clear exposition of what is now known as the
Lamarckian hypothesis. But in the grandson hypotheses were constantly
held in check by the determination to put each to the severe test of
observation. Darwin speaks of his father, Robert, as the most acute
observer he ever saw, and attributes to him his intense desire to
understand the reasons of things; from him came caution and
conservatism. He says in his “Autobiography”:
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any
hypothesis (however much beloved), and I cannot resist forming one on
every subject, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.
If the “poet is born not made,” the man of science is surely both born
and made. Rare as was Darwin’s genius, it was not more rare than the
wonderful succession of outward events which shaped his life. It is true
that Darwin believed with his cousin Francis Galton that education and
environment produce only a small effect upon the mind of any one, but
Darwin underestimated the force of his educational advantages just as he
underestimated his own powers, and this because he thought only of his
book and classroom life at school, at Edinburgh and at Cambridge, and
not of his broader life. It was true in 1817, as today, that few
teachers teach and few educators educate. It is true that those were the
dull days of classical and mathematical drill. Yet look at the roster of
Cambridge and see the men it produced. From Darwin’s regular college
work he may have gained but little, yet he was all the while enjoying an
exceptional training. Step by step he was made a strong man by a mental
guidance which is without parallel, by the precepts and example of his
father, for whom he held the greatest reverence, by his reading of the
poetry of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Milton, and the
scientific prose of Paley, Herschel and Humboldt, by the subtle
scholarly influences of old Cambridge, by the scientific inspiration and
advice of Henslow, by the masterful inductive influence of the geologist
Lyell, and by the great nature panorama of the voyage of the _Beagle_.
The college mates of Darwin saw more truly than he himself what the old
university was doing for him. Professor Poulton of Oxford believes that
the kind of life which so favored Darwin’s mind has largely disappeared
in English universities, especially under the sharp system of
competitive examinations; yet this is still more truly the atmosphere of
old Cambridge today than of any of our American colleges. It would be an
interesting subject to debate whether we could nurture such a man;
whether a Darwin, were he entered at a Columbia, a Harvard, a Princeton,
could develop mentally as Charles Darwin did at Cambridge in 1828. I
believe that conditions for the favorable nurture of such a mind are not
with us. They are repose, time for continuous thought, respect for the
man of brains and of individuality and of such peculiar tastes as Darwin
displayed in his avidity for collecting beetles, freedom from mental
convention, general sympathy for nature, and, above all, ardor in the
world of ideas. If the genial mind cannot find the kindred mind it
cannot develop. Many American school and college men are laughed out of
the finest promptings of their natures. In short, I believe our
intellectual environment would be distinctly against a young Darwin
today.
Thus event after event in Darwin’s life was singularly propitious. None
but a Darwin would have reflected these events as he did, but grand and
rare they certainly were.
At the age of nineteen he entered Christ’s of Cambridge, the small
college which two hundred years before had sheltered John Milton, the
great poet of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of the special creation theory
which it was Darwin’s destiny to destroy. His passion for sport,
shooting, hunting, cross-country riding, his genial enjoyment of friends
of his own age, did not prevent delightful excursions with older men. He
was known as “the man who walks with Henslow”; and close personal
intercourse with this learned and genial botanist (Reverend Wm. C.
Henslow) affected him more than any other feature of his college life.
After graduation this personal association extended through Henslow to
the geologist Sedgwick, who prepared him for the next step in his
career. It was Henslow who secured for him his place on the exploring
ship _Beagle_ and the voyage round the world (1831–1836), by far the
most important experience in his life.
No graduate course in any university can compare for a moment with the
glorious vision which passed before young Darwin on the _Beagle_, but
here again fortune smiled upon him, for this vision required the very
scientific spirit and point of view which came to him through the
reading of the “Principles of Geology” of Lyell, the masterly teacher of
the uniformitarian doctrine of Hutton. That nature worked slowly in past
as in present time and that the interpretation of the past is through
observation of the present gave the note of Darwin’s larger and more
original interpretation, because the slow evolution which Lyell piously
restricted to geology and the surface of the earth Darwin extended to
biology and all living beings. If during the voyage Lyell’s arguments
convinced Darwin of the permanence of species, Lyell’s way of looking at
nature also gave him the means of seeing that species are not permanent.
In his own words, he “saw through Lyell’s eyes,” and with the admiration
of others always so characteristic of him his tribute to Lyell is
without reserve. The second edition of “The Journal” is dedicated:
With grateful pleasure as an acknowledgment that the chief part of
whatever scientific merit this Journal and the other works of the
author may possess has been derived from studying the well-known and
admirable “Principles of Geology.”
The five years of the voyage filled the twenty-second to twenty-seventh
years of Darwin’s life, the period now ordinarily given to professional
studies. In reading the simple but fascinating “Journal,” which stands
quite by itself in literature, we see how Darwin through his own genius
and through the methods successively impressed upon him by his father,
by Henslow, by Sedgwick and by Lyell was unconsciously preparing his
mind for the “Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man,” the two most
influential books of science which have ever appeared. From the islands
of the Atlantic and the Pacific we follow his delightful comments on
animals and plants of all kinds on sea and land, through forests, pampas
and steppes, up the dry slopes of the Andes, along the salt lakes and
deserts of Chili and of Australia. The dense forests of Brazil, pendant
with orchids and gay with butterflies, contrast with those of Terra del
Fuego and of Tahiti, and with the deforested Cape de Verde Islands. On
these islands, the first he visits, he is enormously impressed by the
superiority of Lyell’s method. He visits other islands of all kinds,
inhabited and uninhabited, the non-volcanic St. Paul’s rocks,
half-submerged volcanic cones, coral reefs and islands of the south
Pacific. He observes live glaciers, as well as the contrasting action of
active and of dead volcanoes. Along the rivers of Patagonia he unearths
great extinct or fossil mammals; in Peru he studies the extinct races of
man; the aborigines of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia make the most
profound impression upon his mind. In brief, he sees the great drama of
nature in all its lesser scenes and in all its grander acts. He begins
the voyage a firm believer in the fixity of species, but doubts begin to
enter his mind when in the sands of the pampas of South America he
perceives that the extinct forms are partly ancestral to the living, and
when on the isolated Galapagos Islands he finds the life is not that of
a special creation but that detached from the continent of South America
six hundred miles distant.
Darwin says:
I owe to the voyage the first real training and education of my mind.
That my mind had developed is rendered probable by my father’s first
exclamation on my return, “why the shape of his head is quite
altered.”