THE NET RESULT.
And now let us ask ourselves, in all sincerity, what was the final
outcome and net result of Darwin's great and useful life?
If Charles Darwin had never existed at all, there would still have been
a considerable and expansive evolutionary movement both in biology and
in its sister sciences throughout the latter half of the present
century. The harvest indeed was ready, and the labourers, though few,
were full of vigour. Suppose for a moment that that earnest and
single-hearted Darwinian genius had been cut off by some untimely
disease of childhood at five years old, all other conditions remaining
as they were, we should even so have had in our midst to-day, a small
philosophical and influential band of evolutionary workers. Spencer
would none the less have given us his 'First Principles' and the major
part of his 'Principles of Biology,' with comparatively little
alteration or omission. Wallace would none the less have promulgated his
inchoate theory of natural selection, and rallied round his primordial
conception the very best and deepest minds of the biological fraction.
Geology would have enforced the continuity of types; Cope and Marsh
would have unearthed for our edification the ancestral forms of the
evolving horse and the toothed birds of the Western American deposits.
The Solenhofen lithographic slates would still have yielded us the
half-reptilian, half-avian Archæopteryx; the tertiary deposits would
still have presented us with a long suite of gradually specialised and
modified mammalian forms. The Siberian meadows would have sent us that
intermediate creature which Prjevalsky recognises as the half-way house
between the horses and the donkeys; the rivers of Queensland would have
disclosed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill-breathing
barramunda, in which Günther discerns the missing link between the
ganoid fishes on the one hand, and the mudfish and salamandroid
amphibians on the other. From data such as these, biologists and
palæontologists of the calibre of Huxley, Gaudry, Geikie, Rütimeyer, and
Busk, would necessarily have derived, by the aid of Wallace's pregnant
principle, conclusions not so very far remote from Darwin's own. Heer
and Saporta would have drawn somewhat similar inferences from the fossil
flora of Switzerland and of Greenland; Hooker and De Candolle would have
read pretty much the self-same lessons in the scattered ferns and scanty
palm-trees of oceanic islands. Kowalevsky would have seen in the
ascidian larva a common prototype of the vertebrate series; the
followers of Von Baer would have popularised the embryological
conception of the single origin of animal life. The researches of
Boucher de Perthes, of Lyell, of Evans, of Boyd Dawkins, of Keller, and
of Christy and Lartet, would have unrolled before our eyes, under any
circumstances, the strange story of prehistoric man. On the facts so
gained, Lubbock and Tylor, Schaafhausen and Büchner, would have built up
their various consistent theories of human development and human
culture. In short, even without Charles Darwin, the nineteenth century
would not have stood still; it would have followed in the wake of Buffon
and Diderot, of Lamarck and Laplace, of St. Hilaire and Goethe, of Kant
and Herschel, of Hutton and Lyell, of Malthus and of Spencer. The great
world never rolls down the abysses of time obedient to the nod of one
single overruling Titanic intellect. 'If the doctrine of evolution had
not existed,' says Huxley, 'palæontologists must have invented it.'
But Charles Darwin acted, nevertheless, the part of an immense and
powerful accelerating energy. The impetus which he gave gained us at
least fifty years of progress; it sent us at a bound from Copernicus to
Newton; so far as ordinary minds were concerned, indeed, it transcended
at a single leap the whole interval from Ptolemy to Herschel. The
comparison is far from being a mere rhetorical one. A close analogy
really exists between the two cases. Before Copernicus, the earth stood
fixed and immovable in the centre of the universe, with obsequious suns,
and planets, and satellites dancing attendance in cycle and epicycle
around the solid mass, to which by day and night they continually
ministered. The great astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus,
Galileo, and Kepler, and completed by Newton, Laplace, and Herschel,
reduced the earth to its true position as a petty planet, revolving
feebly among its bigger brethren round a petty sun, in some lost corner
of a vast, majestic, and almost illimitable galaxy. Even so, before
Darwin, man stood in his own esteem the fixed point of an
anthropocentric universe, divinely born and divinely instructed, with
all the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, and the fruits of
the earth specially created with a definite purpose in subservience to
his lordly wants and interests. The great biological revolution, which
rightly almost sums itself up in the name of Darwin, reduced man at once
to his true position as the last product of kinetic solar energy,
working upon the peculiar chemical elements of an evolving planet. It
showed that every part of every plant and every animal existed primarily
for the sake of that plant or animal alone; it unseated man from his
imaginary throne in the centre of the cosmos, teaching him at once a
lesson of humility and a lesson of aspiration--pointing out to him how
low was the origin from which, in very truth, he first sprang, and
suggesting to him, at the same time, how high was the grand and glorious
destiny to which by his own strenuous and ardent efforts he might yet
perchance some day attain.
That result, inevitable perhaps in the long run, from the slow unfolding
of human intelligence, was immensely hastened in our own time by the
peculiar idiosyncrasy and lofty personality of Charles Darwin. Without
him we should have had, not only evolutionism, but also, as Wallace's
discovery testifies, natural selection itself into the bargain. But we
should never have had the 'Origin of Species.' We should never have had
that vast and enthusiastic consensus of scientific opinion through an
all but unanimous thinking world, which has forced an immediate
acceptance of evolutionary ideas down the unwilling throats of half
unthinking Europe. The prodigious mass of Darwin's facts, the cautious
working of Darwin's intellect, the immense weight of Darwin's
reputation, the crushing force of Darwin's masterly inductive method,
bore down before them all opposition in the inner circle of biologists,
and secured the triumph of the evolutionary system even in the very
strongholds of ignorance and obscurantism. Without Darwin, a small group
of philosophic thinkers would still be striving to impress upon an
incredulous and somewhat contemptuous world the central truths of the
evolutionary doctrine. The opposition of the elders, long headed even in
the society we actually know by a few stern scientific recalcitrants,
like Owen and Agassiz, Pictet and Dawson, Virchow and Mivart, would have
fought desperately in the last trench for the final figment of the
fixity of species. What is now the general creed, more or less loosely
held and imperfectly understood, of hundreds and thousands among the
intelligent mass, would, under such circumstances, be even yet the mere
party-shibboleth of an esoteric few, struggling hard against the bare
force of overwhelming numbers to ensure not only recognition but a fair
hearing for the first principles of the development theory. It is to
Darwin, and to Darwin almost alone, that we owe the present
comparatively wide acceptance of the all-embracing doctrine of
evolution.
No other man did so much or could have done so much to ensure its
triumph. He began early in life to collect and arrange a vast
encyclopædia of facts, all finally focussed with supreme skill upon the
great principle he so clearly perceived, and so lucidly expounded. He
brought to bear upon the question an amount of personal observation, of
minute experiment, of world-wide book-knowledge, of universal scientific
ability, such as never perhaps was lavished by any other man upon any
other department of study. His conspicuous and beautiful love of truth,
his unflinching candour, his transparent fearlessness and honesty of
purpose, his child-like simplicity, his modesty of demeanour, his
charming manner, his affectionate disposition, his kindliness to friends,
his courtesy to opponents, his gentleness to harsh and often bitter
assailants, kindled in the minds of men of science everywhere throughout
the world a contagious enthusiasm, only equalled perhaps among the
disciples of Socrates and the great teachers of the revival of learning.
His name became a rallying-point for the children of light in every
country; and what philosophers and speculators might have taken a
century or two more to establish in embryo was firmly grounded, never to
be overthrown, by the vast accumulations of fact and argument in the
'Origin of Species,' and its companion volumes.
The end of that great Darwinian revolution the world has not yet seen:
in a sense, indeed, it will never see it. For the general acceptance of
Darwin's theory, which we may watch progressing around us every minute
to-day, implies a complete _bouleversement_ of anthropocentric ideas, a
total change in our human conception of our own relations to the world
and the universe, which must work out for ever increasingly
wide-reaching and complex effects in all our dealings with one another
and with the environment at large. There is no department of human
thought or human action which evolutionism leaves exactly where it
stood before the advent of the Darwinian conception. In nothing is this
fact more conspicuously seen than in the immediate obsolescence (if one
may so speak) of all the statical pre-Darwinian philosophies which
ignored development, as soon as ever the new progressive evolutionary
theories had fairly burst upon an astonished world. Dogmatic Comte was
left forthwith to his little band of devoted adherents; shadowy Hegel
was relegated with a bow to the cool shades of the common-rooms of
Oxford; Buckle was exploded like an inflated wind-bag; even Mill
himself--_magnum et venerabile nomen_--with all his mighty steam-hammer
force of logical directness, was felt instinctively to be lacking in
full appreciation of the dynamic and kinetic element in universal
nature. Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel and Clifford, had the field to
themselves for the establishment of their essentially evolutionary
systems. Great thinkers of the elder generation, like Bain and Lyell,
felt bound to remodel their earlier conceptions by the light of the new
Darwinian hypotheses. Those who failed by congenital constitution to do
so, like Carlyle and Carpenter, were, philosophically speaking, left
hopelessly behind and utterly extinguished. Those who only half
succeeded in thus reading themselves into the new ideas, like Lewes and
Max Müller, lost ground immediately before the eager onslaught of their
younger competitors. 'The world is to the young,' says the eastern
proverb; and in a world peopled throughout in the high places of thought
by men almost without exception evolutionists, there was little or no
place for the timid group of stranded Girondins, who still stood aloof
in sullen antique scientific orthodoxy from what seemed to them the
carmagnoles and orgies of a biological Thermidor.
At the same time, it must be steadily remembered that there are many
naturalists at the present day, especially among those of the lower
order of intelligence, who, while accepting evolutionism in a general
way, and therefore always describing themselves as Darwinians, do not
believe and often cannot even understand the distinctive Darwinian
addition to the evolutionary doctrine--namely, the principle of natural
selection. Such hazy and indistinct thinkers as these are still really
at the prior stage of Lamarckian evolutionism. It is probable that in
the future, while a formal acceptance of Darwinism becomes general, the
special theory of natural selection will be thoroughly understood and
assimilated only by the more abstract and philosophical minds. Our
children will be taught as a matter of course the doctrine of
development or of descent with modification; but the rationale of that
descent will still remain in all likelihood always beyond the grasp of
most of them: just as thousands accept on authority the Copernican
astronomy, who would never even be capable of comprehending the simplest
proofs of the earth's annual movement round the sun. Thus the name of
Darwin will often no doubt be tacked on to what are in reality the
principles of Lamarck.
Every day, however, in spite of such half-ignorant adherents, the
effects of true Darwinism are widening and deepening. One group of
earnest workers is using it now as a guide to physiological,
embryological, and anatomical researches. Another is employing it with
zeal and skill in the field of classificatory and physiological botany.
Yet others are working out its psychological implications, enquiring
into instinct and animal intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruse
problems of the human mind and the human emotions. One philosopher has
brought it to bear on questions of ethics, another on questions of
social and political economy. Its principles have been applied in one
place to æsthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place to the
origin and growth of religion. The study of language has derived new
lights from the great central Darwinian luminary. The art of education
is beginning to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian impulse.
In fact, there is hardly a single original worker in any department of
thought or science who has not been more or less profoundly affected,
whether he knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast spreading
and circling wave of the Darwinian conceptions. All our ideas have been
revolutionised and evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in the
world, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal power the dry
bones of all the sciences, all the arts, and all the philosophies.
And evolutionism is gradually though slowly filtering downward. It is
permeating the daily press of the nations, and gaining for its
vocabulary a recognised place in the phraseology of the unlearned
vulgar. Such expressions as 'natural selection,' 'survival of the
fittest,' 'struggle for existence,' 'adaptation to the environment,' and
all the rest of it, are becoming as household words upon the lips of
thousands who only know the name of Darwin as a butt for the petty empty
jibes of infinitesimal cheap witlings. And Darwinism will trickle down
still through a thousand channels, by definite popularisation, and still
more by indefinite absorption into the common thought of universal
humanity, till it becomes part and parcel of the general inheritance,
bred in our bone and burnt into our blood, an heir-loom of our race to
all time and in all countries. Great thoughts like his do not readily
die: they expand and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transform
the world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to the
environment they have themselves created by their informing power.
Happy above ordinary human happiness, Charles Darwin lived himself to
see the prosperous beginning of this great silent philosophical
revolution. Harvey's grand discovery, it has been well said, was scoffed
at for nearly a whole generation. Newton's marvellous law of gravitation
was coldly received even by the gigantic intellect of Leibnitz himself.
Francis Bacon, in disgrace and humiliation, could only commend his name
and memory 'to foreign nations and to the next age.' It is too often so
with thinkers of the first and highest order: it was not so, happily,
with the gentle soul of Charles Darwin. Alone among the prophets and
teachers of triumphant creeds, he saw with his own eyes the adoption of
the faith he had been the first to promulgate in all its fulness by
every fresh and powerful mind of the younger race that grew up around
him. The Nestor of evolutionism, he had lived among two successive
generations of thinkers, and over the third he ruled as king. With that
crowning joy of a great, a noble, and a happy life, let us leave him
here alone in his glory.
INDEX.
AGASSIZ
Anticipations of natural selection
'Antiquity of Man'
Astronomy
BADEN-POWELL
Bahia
Bates; in Brazil; on mimicry
'Beagle,' voyage of the; Zoology of
Bell, Sir C.
Boucher de Perthes
Brazil
British Association
Buffon
CHAMBERS, Robert; his 'Vestiges of Creation'
Colenso on the Pentateuch
'Coral Reefs'
Cuvier; as a geologist; system of animals
DARWIN, Charles, his ancestry; birth; birthplace; contemporaries;
education; at Edinburgh University; at Cambridge; starts on the
voyage of the 'Beagle'; returns to England; publishes his journal;
plans 'Origin of Species'; elected to Royal Society; secretary to
Geological Society; marries; publishes 'Coral Reefs'; geological
observations; Monograph on Barnacles; publishes 'Origin of Species';
its success; second edition; variation of animals and plants;
pangenesis; fertilisation of orchids; 'Descent of Man'; later works;
last illness and death; character; place in evolutionary movement;
outcome of his work
DARWIN, Erasmus; his life; appearance; poems; 'Zoonomia'; 'Temple
of Nature'; his marriages; on descent of man; on sexual selection
Darwin, Erasmus, the younger
Darwin, Robert
Darwin, Robert Waring; his home
De Candolle
Down House, Darwin settles at
Du Chaillu
EARTHWORMS
Edgeworth
Evolution, general theory of
FILHOL
Fiske, Prof.; on natural selection
Fitzroy, Captain
Fuegians
GALAPAGOS ISLANDS
Galton, Francis
Gaudry
Geology, rise of; evolutionary aspect of
Goethe; on animal origin of man
Gorilla
Gray, Asa
HAECKEL, letter to; 'History of Creation'; on sexual selection
Henslow, Prof.; recommends Darwin to Capt. Fitzroy; at Oxford
Herbert, Dean
Herschel, Sir Wm.
Holland, Sir Henry
Hooker, Sir Joseph; on catasetum; accepts Darwinism; publishes his
'Flora of Australia'
Horner, Leonard
Humboldt
Huxley, Prof., lecture at Royal Institution; 'Man's Place in
Nature'; on coming of age of 'Origin of Species'
JUSSIEU
KANT, nebular hypothesis
Knight's law
Kölreuter
LAMARCK; Darwin's reading of; on descent of man
Laplace, nebular hypothesis
Lecoq
Linnæus; his artificial system
Lyell; 'Principles of Geology'; extract from letters; anticipations
of natural selection; slow acceptance of Darwinism; 'Antiquity of Man'
MALTHUS; influence on Darwin
Matthew, Patrick; extracts from
Mimicry
Monte Video, Darwin at
Mould, formation of
Mount, the
Müller, Fritz
Müller, Hermann
Murchison
'NATURALIST on the Amazons'
'Naturalist's Voyage round the World' published
Natural system
Nebular hypothesis
New Zealand, Darwin at
OKEN
'Origin of Species,' first planned projected; published; analysis of;
its success; second edition
Owen, Sir R.; on types
PANGENESIS
'Philosophie Zoologique'
Population, Malthus's essay on
Powell, Baden-
'Physiological Units'
Psychology, evolution in
RAFINESQUE
Rio Janeiro, Darwin at
ST. HILAIRE, Geoffroy; the younger
St. Paul's Rocks
Sexual selection, first glimpse of; Darwin's theory of
Smith, William
Sociology
Spencer, Herbert; on 'Vestiges of Creation'; essay in the 'Leader';
'Principles of Psychology'; essay in 'Westminster Review'; extracts
from 'Leader' essay; accepts Darwin's theory; 'Principles of Biology';
'Physiological Units'; theory of evolution
Sprengel
THOMPSON, Allen
Treviranus
Tucutuco
Tyndall, Prof.
'VESTIGES of Creation'; criticism of
Von Baer
Von Buch
WALLACE, Alfred Russel; goes to Brazil; publishes his travels; in Malay
archipelago; discovers natural selection; paper at Linnean Society; on
sexual selection
Wedgwood, Emma
Wedgwood, Hensleigh
Wedgwood, Josiah
Wedgwood, Susannah
Wells, Dr., anticipates natural selection
White, Gilbert, on worms
Wollaston
Worms, action of
Wright, Chauncey
'ZOONOMIA,' Erasmus Darwin's