DARWIN'S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.
To most people Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing.
After what has here been said, however, with regard to the pre-Darwinian
evolutionary movement, and the distinction between the doctrines of
descent with modification and of natural selection, it need hardly be
added that the two are quite separate and separable in thought, even
within the limits of the purely restricted biological order. Darwinism
is only a part of organic evolution; the theory, as a whole, owes much
to Darwin, but it does not owe everything to him alone. There were
biological evolutionists before ever he published the 'Origin of
Species;' there are biological evolutionists even now who refuse to
accept the truth of his great discovery, and who cling firmly to the
primitive faith set forth in earlier and cruder shapes by Erasmus
Darwin, by Lamarck, or by Robert Chambers.
Much more, then, must Darwinism and the entire theory of organic
development to which it belongs be carefully discriminated, as a part or
factor, from evolution at large, as a universal and all-embracing
cosmical system. That system itself has gradually emerged as a slow
growth of the past two centuries, a progressive development of the
collective scientific and philosophical mind of humanity, not due in its
totality to any one single commanding thinker, but summing itself up at
last in our own time more fully in the person and teaching of Mr.
Herbert Spencer than of any other solitary mouthpiece. Indeed,
intimately as we all now associate the name of Darwin with the word
'evolution,' that term itself (whose vogue is almost entirely due to Mr.
Spencer's influence) was one but rarely found upon Darwin's own lips,
and but rarely written by his own pen. He speaks rather of development
and of natural selection than of evolution: his own concern was more
with its special aspect as biological modification than with its general
aspect as cosmical unfolding. Let us ask, then, from this wider
standpoint of a great and far-reaching mental revolution, what was
Charles Darwin's exact niche in the evolutionary movement of the two
last centuries?
Evolutionism, as now commonly understood, may be fairly regarded as a
mode of envisaging to ourselves the history of the universe, a tendency
or frame of mind, a temperament, one might almost say, or habit of
thought rather than a definite creed or body of dogmas. The evolutionist
looks out upon the cosmos as a continuous process unfolding itself in
regular order in obedience to definite natural laws. He sees in it all,
not a warring chaos restrained by the constant interference from without
of a wise and beneficent external power, but a vast aggregate of
original elements, perpetually working out their own fresh
redistribution, in accordance with their own inherent energies. He
regards the cosmos as an almost infinite collection of material atoms,
animated by an almost infinite sum-total of energy, potential or
kinetic.
In the very beginning, so far as the mental vision of the astronomer can
dimly pierce with hypothetical glance the abyss of ages, the matter
which now composes the material universe seems to have existed in a
highly diffuse and nebulous condition. The gravitative force, however,
with which every atom of the whole vast mass was primarily endowed,
caused it gradually to aggregate around certain fixed and definite
centres, which became in time the rallying-points or nuclei of future
suns. The primitive potential energy of separation in the atoms of the
mass was changed into actual energy of motion as they drew closer and
closer together about the common centre, and into molecular energy or
heat as they clashed with one another in bodily impact around the
hardening core. Thus arose stars and suns, composed of fiery atomic
clouds in a constant state of progressive concentration, ever
gathering-in the hem of their outer robes on the surface of the solid
globe within, and ever radiating off their store of associated energy to
the impalpable and hypothetical surrounding ether. This, in necessarily
brief and shadowy abstract, is the nebular theory of Kant and Laplace,
as amended and supplemented by the modern doctrine of the correlation
and conservation of energies.
Applied to the solar system, of which our own planet forms a component
member, the evolutionary doctrine (in its elder shape) teaches us to
envisage that minor group as the final result of a single great diffuse
nebula, which once spread its faint and cloud-like mass with
inconceivable tenuity, at least as far from its centre, now occupied by
the sun's body, as the furthest point in the orbit of Neptune, the
outermost of the yet known planets. From this remote and immense
periphery it has gradually gathered itself in, growing denser and denser
all the time, towards its common core, and has left behind, at irregular
intervals, concentric rings or belts of nebulous matter, which, after
rupturing at their weakest point, have hardened and concentrated round
their own centre of gravity into Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth, or Venus.
The main central body of all, retreating ever within as it dropped in
its course the raw material of the planetary masses, has formed, at
last, the sun, the great ruler and luminary of our system. Much as this
primitive evolutionary concept of the development and history of the
solar system has been modified and altered of late years by recent
researches into the nature of comets and meteors and of the sun's
surface, it still remains for all practical purposes of popular
exposition the best and simplest mental picture of the general type of
astronomical evolution. For the essential point which it impresses upon
the mind is the idea of the planets in their several orbits and with
their attendant satellites as due, not to external design and special
creation, in the exact order in which we now see them, but to the slow
and regular working out of preordained physical laws, in accordance with
which they have each naturally assumed, by pure force of circumstances,
their existing size, and weight, and orbit, and position.
Geology has applied a similar conception to the origin and becoming of
the earth's material and external features as we now know them.
Accepting from astronomy the notion of our planet's primary condition as
a cooling sphere of incandescent matter, it goes on to show how the two
great envelopes, atmospheric and oceanic, gaseous and liquid, have
gradually formed around its solid core; how the hard crust of the
central mass has been wrinkled and corrugated into mountain chain and
deep-cut valley, uplifted here into elevated table-land or there
depressed into hollow ocean bed; how sediment has slowly gathered on the
floor of the sea, and how volcanic energies or lateral pressure have
subsequently forced up the resulting deposits into Alpine peaks and
massive continents. In this direction, it was Lyell who principally
introduced into science the uniformitarian or evolutionary principle,
who substituted for the frequent cataclysms and fresh beginnings of the
earlier geologists the grand conception of continuous action, producing
from comparatively infinitesimal but cumulative causes effects which at
last attain by accretion the most colossal proportions.
Here biology next steps in, with its splendid explanation of organic
life, as due essentially to the secondary action of radiated solar
energy on the outer crust of such a cooling and evolving planet. Falling
on the cells of the simplest green plants, the potent sunlight
dissociates the carbon from the oxygen in the carbonic acid floating in
the atmosphere, and builds it up with the hydrogen of water in the
tissues of the organism into starches and other organic products, which
differ from the inert substances around them, mainly by the possession
of locked-up solar energy. On the energy-yielding food-stuffs thus
stored up the animal in turn feeds and battens, reducing what was before
potential into actual motion, just as the steam-engine reduces the
latent solar energy of coal into visible heat and visible movement in
its furnace and its machinery. How the first organism came to exist
biology has not yet been able fully to explain for us; but aided by
chemical science it has been able to show us in part how some of the
simpler organic bodies may have been originally built up, and it does
not despair of showing us in the end how the earliest organism may
actually have been produced from the prime elements of oxygen, hydrogen,
nitrogen, and carbon. Into this most fundamental of biological problems,
however, Darwin himself, with his constitutional caution and dread of
speculative theorising, was not careful or curious to enter. Even upon
the far less abstruse and hypothetical question, whether all life took
its prime origin from a single starting-point or from several distinct
and separate tribal ancestors, he hardly cared so much as to hazard a
passing speculation. With splendid self-restraint he confined his
attention almost entirely to the more manageable and practical problem
of the origin of species by natural selection, which lay then and there
open for solution before him. Taking for granted the existence of the
original organism or group of organisms, the fact of reproduction, and
the tendency of such reproduction to beget increase in a geometrical
ratio, he deduced from these elementary given factors the necessary
corollary of survival of the fittest, with all its marvellous and
far-reaching implications of adaptation to the environment and specific
distinctions. By doing so, he rendered conceivable the mechanism of
evolution in the organic world, thus bringing another great aspect of
external nature within the range of the developmental as opposed to the
miraculous philosophy of the cosmos.
Psychology, once more, in the hands of Herbert Spencer and his
followers, not wholly unaided by Darwin himself, has extended the
self-same evolutionary treatment to the involved and elusive phenomena
of mind, and has shown how from the simplest unorganised elements of
feeling, the various mental powers and faculties as we now know them,
both on the intellectual and on the emotional side, have been slowly
built up in the long and ever-varying interaction between the sentient
organism and the natural environment. It has traced the first faint
inception of a nervous system as a mere customary channel of
communication between part and part; the gradual growth of fibre and
ganglion; the vague beginnings of external sense-organ and internal
brain; the final perfection of eye and ear, of sight and hearing, of
pleasure and pain, of intellect and volition. It has thus done for the
subjective or mental half of our complex nature what biology, as
conceived by Darwin, has done for the physical or purely organic half;
it has traced the origin and development of mind, without a single
break, from its first faint and half-unconscious manifestation in the
polyp or the jelly-fish to its final grand and varied outcome in the
soul of the poet or the intellect of the philosopher.
Finally, sociology has applied the evolutionary method to the origin and
rise of human societies, with their languages, customs, arts, and
institutions, their governmental organisation and their ecclesiastical
polity. Taking from biology the evolving savage, viewed as a developed
and highly gifted product of the anthropoid stock, it has shown by what
stages and through what causes he has slowly aggregated into tribes and
nations; has built up his communal, polygamic, or monogamic family; has
learnt the use of fire, of implements, of pottery, of metals; has
developed the whole resources of oral speech and significant gesture;
has invented writing, pictorial or alphabetic; has grown up to science,
to philosophy, to morals, and to religion. The chief honours of this
particular line of enquiry, the latest and youngest of all to receive
the impact of the evolutionary impulse, belong mainly to Tylor, Lubbock,
and Spencer in England, and to Haeckel, De Mortillet, and Wagner on the
continent.
In the sublime conception of the external universe and its present
workings which we thus owe to the independent efforts of so many great
progressive thinkers, and which has here been briefly and inadequately
sketched out, Darwin's work in life falls naturally into its own place
as the principal contribution to the evolutionary movement in the
special biological department of thought. Within the more limited range
of that department itself, the evolutionary impulse did not owe its
origin to Charles Darwin personally; it took its rise with Erasmus
Darwin, Buffon, and Lamarck, and it derived from our great modern
English naturalist its final explanation and definitive proof alone. But
just as the evolutionary movement in astronomy and cosmical thought is
rightly associated in all our minds with the mighty theories of Kant,
Laplace, and Herschel; just as the evolutionary movement in geology is
rightly associated with the far lesser yet brilliant and effective
personality of Lyell; just as the evolutionary movement in the
derivative sciences is rightly associated with so many great still
living thinkers; so the evolutionary movement in biology in particular
rightly sums itself up in the honoured name of Charles Darwin. For what
others suspected, he was the first to prove; where others speculated, he
was the first to observe, to experiment, to demonstrate, and to
convince.
It should be noted, too, that while to us who come after, the great
complex evolutionary movement of the two last centuries justly reveals
itself as one and indivisible, a single grand cosmical drama, having
many acts and many scenes, but all alike inspired by one informing and
pervading unity, yet to those whose half unconscious co-operation slowly
built it up by episodes, piecemeal, each act and each scene unrolled
itself separately as an end in itself, to be then and there attained and
proved, quite apart from the conception of its analytic value as a part
in a great harmonious natural poem of the constitution of things. Though
evolution appears to us now as a single grand continuous process, a
phase of the universe dependent upon a preponderating aggregation of
matter and dissipation of energy, yet to Kant and Laplace it was the
astronomical aspect alone that proved attractive, to Darwin it was the
biological aspect alone, and to many of the modern workers in the minor
fields it is the human and sociological aspect that almost monopolises
the whole wide mental horizon. No greater proof can be given of the
subjective distinctness of parts in what was objectively and
fundamentally a single broad psychological revolution of the human mind,
than the fact that Lyell himself, who more than any one man had
introduced the evolutionary conception into the treatment of geology,
should have stood out so long and fought so blindly against the
evolutionary conception in the organic world. Indeed, it was not until
the various scattered and many-coloured strands of evolutionary thought
had been gathered together and woven into one by the vast catholic and
synthetic intelligence of Herbert Spencer that the idea of evolution as
a whole, as a single continuous cosmical process, began to be
apprehended and gradually assimilated by the picked intelligences of the
several distinct scientific departments.
Observe also that the evolutionary method has invaded each of the
concrete sciences in the exact order of their natural place in the
hierarchy of knowledge. It had been applied to astronomy by Kant and
Laplace before it was applied to geology by Lyell; it had been applied
to geology by Lyell before it was applied to biology by Darwin; it had
been applied to biology (in part, at least) by Lamarck and the Darwins
before it was applied to psychology by Spencer; and it is only at the
very end of all that it has been applied to sociology and the allied
branches of thought by a hundred different earnest workers in
contemporary Europe. Each stage helped on the next; each was dependent
only on those that went naturally before it, and aided in turn the
subsequent development of those that naturally came after it.
Nevertheless, the popular instinct which regards Darwinism and evolution
as practically synonymous is to a large extent justified by the actual
facts of the psychological upheaval. Darwin's work forms on the whole
the central keystone of the evolutionary system, and deserves the honour
which has been thrust upon it of supporting by its own mass the entire
superstructure of the development theory.
For, in the first place, Darwin had to deal with the science of life,
the science where the opposition to evolutionism was sure to be
strongest, and where the forces and tendencies in favour of obscurantism
were sure to gather in fullest force. Every other great onward step in
our knowledge of our own relation to the universe of which we form a
part had been compelled indeed to run the gauntlet, in its own time, of
ecclesiastical censure and of popular dislike. Those inveterate
prejudices of human ignorance which sedulously hide their genuine shape
under the guise of dogma masquerading as religion, had long since
brought to bear their baneful resources upon the discoveries of
Copernicus and the theories of Galileo, as blind, misleading, and
diabolical lights, opposed to the sure and certain warranty of Holy
Scripture. Newton, again, had in due time been blamed in that he boldly
substituted (as his critics declared) the bald and barren formula of
gravitation for the personal superintendence of a divine Providence.
Laplace had been accused of dethroning the deity from the centre and
governance of his celestial system. Around the early geologists the
battle of the six days of creation had raged fiercely for nearly half a
century. But all these varying modes of thought, though deemed heretical
enough in their own day, had touched, as it were, but the minor
ramparts and unimportant out-works of the great obscurantist dogmatic
strongholds: Darwinism, by openly attacking the inmost problems of life
and mind, had brought to bear its powerful artillery upon the very keep
and highest tower of the fortress itself. The belief that the various
stars, planets, and satellites had or had not been wisely created in
their existing positions, and with their present orbits, movements, and
relations accurately fore-measured, did not fundamentally affect, for
good or evil, the cherished dogmas of the ordinary multitude. But the
analogous belief in the distinct and separate creation of plants and
animals, and more especially of the human species, was far more closely
and intimately bound up with all the current religious conceptions. It
was at first supposed, not perhaps without some practical wisdom, that
to upset the primitive faith in the separate creation of living beings
was to loosen and imperil the very foundations of common morality and
revealed religion. The 'argument from design' had been immemorially
regarded as the principal buttress of orthodox thought. Theologians had
unwisely staked their all upon the teleological dogma, and could ill
afford to retire without a blow from that tenaciously defended bastion
of their main position. Hence the evolutionary concept had its hardest
fight to wage over the biological field; and when that field was once
fairly won, it had little more to fear from banded preconceptions and
established prejudices in any other portion of the wide territory it
claimed for its own.
In the second place, biological evolution, firmly established by Darwin
on a safe, certain, and unimpeachable basis, led naturally and almost
inevitably to all the other innumerable applications of the
evolutionary method, in the domains of psychology, sociology, philology,
political thought, and ethical science. Hence the immediate and visible
results of its promulgation have been far more striking, noticeable, and
evident than those which followed the establishment of the evolutionary
conception in the astronomical and geological departments. It was
possible to accept cosmical evolution and solar evolution and planetary
evolution, without at the same time accepting evolution in the
restricted field of life and mind. But it was impossible to accept
evolution in biology without at the same time extending its application
to psychology, to the social organism, to language, to ethics, to all
the thousand and one varied interests of human life and human
development. Now, most people are little moved by speculations and
hypotheses as to the origin of the milky way or the belt of Orion; they
care very slightly for Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings; they are
stolidly incurious as to the development of the earth's crust, or the
precise date of the cretaceous epoch; but they understand and begin to
be touched the moment you come to the practical questions of man's
origin, nature, and history. Darwinism compelled their attention by its
immediate connection with their own race; and the proof of this truth is
amply shown by the mere fact that out of all the immense variety of
Charles Darwin's theories and ideas, the solitary one which alone has
succeeded in attaching to itself the public interest and public ridicule
is the theory of man's ultimate descent from a monkey-like ancestor.
Popular instinct, here as elsewhere profoundly true at core in the midst
of all its superficial foolishness, has rightly hit upon the central
element in the Darwinian conception which more than any other has caused
its fruitful and wonderful expansion through every fertile field of
human enquiry.
In short, it was Darwin's task in life to draw down evolution from
heaven to earth, and to bring within the scope of its luminous method
all that is most interesting to the uninstructed and unsophisticated
heart of the natural man.
The application of the evolutionary principle to the world of life,
human or animal, thus presents itself as the chief philosophic and
scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. Throughout the whole
middle decades of the present age, the human mind in all its highest
embodiments was eagerly searching, groping, and enquiring after a
naturalistic explanation of the origin and progress of organic life. In
the vast scheme for the System of Synthetic Philosophy which Herbert
Spencer set forth as an anticipatory synopsis of his projected work, the
philosopher of development leapt at once from the First Principles of
evolution as a whole to the Principles of Biology, Psychology, and
Sociology, omitting all reference to the application of evolution to the
vast field of inorganic nature; and he did so on the distinctly stated
ground that its application to organic nature was then and there more
important and interesting. That suggestive expression of belief aptly
sums up the general attitude of scientific and philosophic minds at the
precise moment of the advent of Darwinism. Kant and Laplace and Lyell
had already applied the evolutionary method to suns and systems, to
planets and continents; what was needed next was that some deeply
learned and universally equipped biological leader should help the lame
evolutionism of Lamarck over the organic stile, and leave it free to
roam the boundless fields of what Mr. Spencer has sometimes well
described as the super-organic sciences. For that office, Darwin at the
exact moment presented himself; and his victory and its results rightly
entitle him to the popular regard as the founder of all that most men
mean when they speak together in everyday conversation of the doctrine
of evolution.
On the other hand, the total esoteric philosophic conception of
evolution as a cosmical process, one and continuous from nebula to man,
from star to soul, from atom to society, we owe rather to the other
great prophet of the evolutionary creed, Herbert Spencer, whose name
will ever be equally remembered side by side with his mighty peer's, in
a place of high collateral glory. It is he who has given us the general
definition of evolution as a progress from an indefinite, incoherent
homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, accompanying an
integration of matter and dissipation of motion, or, as we should now
perhaps more correctly say, of energy. In the establishment of the
various lines of thought which merge at last in that magnificent
cosmical law, it was Darwin's special task to bring the phenomena of
organic life well within the clear ken of known and invariable natural
processes.