DARWIN
We still celebrate, at a distance of centuries, the return of the
birthday of great men. In reality it is a mistake. We ought to celebrate
the hour when not merely life, but _the idea of their life_, quickened
them. That is the really important birth that calls for commemoration.
Luther’s real birthday was when he nailed his theses to the church door.
Then was born the Luther that belongs to the world. Over the
world-cradle of Columbus shines, not the trivial and evanescent planet
given in his horoscope, but the little red flickering star of Guanahani,
the light that he saw from the shore on the night before he landed on an
island of the New World.
Life is a voyage of discovery to the man who passes through it. He looks
out with his child-eyes and discovers the world—at the bottom, discovers
only himself. But one day a greater veil is torn from before his self.
Genius, the greater I, stirs within him like the butterfly in its narrow
pupa-case. For the world at large that is the hour when the _great_ man
is born who will leave his mark on it.
Haeckel’s biography only begins on a certain day, if we look at it
rightly and broadly. Until that day he is merely a young man, an
outgrowth from a rich old civilisation: a young man who has felt in him
a struggle between artistic and scientific tendencies, like so many: who
has vacillated between the choice of a “paying profession” and research
for its own sake, and has decided for the former, like so many: who has
chosen zoology, and begun to work hard on professional lines at his
science: and who has been told prophetically that he will one day do
something, though along a line where much has been done already. In the
whole of this development we have as yet no indication of the real tenor
of his life.
It comes first with the name of Darwin. The arabesque of a very
different life begins to blend with that of his own.
In the February of the year in which Haeckel was born (1834),
twenty-eight years before the point we have arrived at, Charles Darwin
was on a scientific expedition to South America. There is a romantic
element in the earlier story of this journey. The naked Fuegians had
stolen a boat from an English Government ship that was engaged in making
geographical measurements, towards the close of the twenties, on the
wild coast of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy, the captain, arrested a few of
the natives, brought them on board as hostages, and in the end took them
with him to England. They were to be instructed in morality and
Christianity and then taken back to their people, in order to introduce
these elements of civilisation, for the advantage of shipwrecked sailors
or distressed travellers who might fall in with them. We feel a breath
of the spirit of Rousseau in it. As a fact nothing came of the device.
The good Fuegians were clothed and improved by civilised folk for a year
or two, returned home, immediately abandoned their trousers and their
Christianity, and remained naked savages. But the bringing home of these
hostages led, in the early thirties, to a new expedition of FitzRoy to
Tierra del Fuego. The Government directed him to draw up further charts,
and he looked about for a man of science to accompany him.
The man proved to be Charles Darwin, then in his twenty-second year.
The son of a prosperous provincial physician, he had begun to study
medicine without much success, and was transferred to theology, only to
find after three years of study that he was as little fitted to become a
country clergyman as a country doctor. He had an unconquerable love of
scientific investigation. He collected all kinds of things, and desired
to travel, without any very clear idea of his destiny. A chance
introduction came to the young man as a godsend, and he joined FitzRoy’s
expedition to South America. Once more, it was this journey that made
him “Darwin,” the mighty intellectual force in the nineteenth century.
Darwin found an idea in South America. You have to examine it very
closely to appreciate it clearly. Let us recapitulate very briefly the
hundred years of zoology and botany that had gone before.
In the eighteenth century Linné drew up, for the first time, a great
catalogue of plant and animal species. Each species had a solid Latin
name, and was provided with its particular label, by which every
representative of the species could be recognised at once. Then the
species were bracketed together in larger groups, and a general system
was formed. It was an immense scientific advance, and is still generally
appreciated as such. But we have to make one reserve. It is not man that
separates things; nature, or rather God who created nature, has already
distinguished them. In this respect zoology and botany are of God. The
various species of plants and animals are something firmly established
by God. Take the polar bear, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or a
particular species of palm, or vine, or rose. There they are, and all
that man has to do is to learn their specific characters in order to
determine and name them.
Behind all this we really have the ancient idea of the Mosaic story of
creation. God made the animals and plants, species by species, put them
in their places, and said to man, “Name them as you think fit, classify
them, putting the like together and separating the unlike.” So God spake
to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a Fuegian. Linné comes on the
scene some six thousand years afterwards to set about this naming and
arranging in earnest. But that does not make much difference. There are
the species created by God. They have ceaselessly reproduced themselves
since the days of Paradise according to the command to increase and
multiply, each one in its own kind, so that the polar bear has only
begotten polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus
hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive Paradise is still
there, and Linné, the official professor at Upsala, with his venerable
wig and embroidered coat, can take up the work of the naked Adam with a
good conscience, and finish what the patriarch had not been able to do.
Linné died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe was beginning the
_Iphigenia_ and _Wilhelm Meister_) in the full fame of all these
achievements and all his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty years
elapsed between this and Darwin’s voyage; but in those fifty years the
following process is accomplished:—
An increasing number of bones and other relics of animal species, that
exist no longer, were dug out of the earth. In South America the
skeleton was found of a giant-sloth, the megatherium, the remains of a
kind of animal, larger than the elephant, that no traveller could find
living in the country. The famous mammoth-corpse came to light in the
ice of Siberia; an entirely strange elephant with curved tusks and a red
woolly coat. Ichthyosauri were found in the rocks in England, and so on.
All these “extinct” species had to be named and arranged in the system.
A special scientific indication was put on them, which means “extinct.”
But this was not enough for thought—which cannot be “entirely dispensed
with,” as some one well said, even in exact science.
Where did these extinct species come from? What is their relation to the
Creator? Were they created long ago in Paradise with the others, and
afterwards conveyed in the ark, only to disappear in the course of time?
And what was the cause of their disappearance? Must we conclude that
part of what Adam saw was not available for Linné and his pupils? These
four remains, a few bones here and there, do not tell us much about
them.
Therefore, species may perish: many of them have perished.
There was something new in this, something that obscured the clear lines
of earlier science. However, a way of escape was found. It was claimed
that these grotesque monsters—ichthyosauri, megatheria, mammoths,
&c.—represent an earlier creation, with which Adam had nothing to do.
Cuvier developed the theory in his grandiose way in 1812. Before the
creation of the animal and plant species that Adam found in Paradise
there was a long series of periods in the history of the earth, each of
which had its own animal and plant population. It was in one of these
periods that the forests grew which we find fossilised in our coal. In
another the ichthyosauri, gigantic lizards, filled the ocean. In a third
the hideous megatherium dragged along its huge frame, and so on. It is
true that there is nothing in the Bible about these ancient and extinct
periods; but the Mosaic verses move quickly—they press on to come to
man. The repeated creations of the animal and plant worlds are summed up
in a single one. We must read something between the lines.
Apart from that, everything is clear. Hence the ancient species were
made fixed, solid, and unchangeable by God just like the later species
that Adam found in Paradise, and that still exist. Without the will of
God they could no more have died out than the actual ones; and there
were no human beings there to destroy them. But the divine action
intervened. At the end of each of these old-world periods a terrible
spectacle was witnessed. The heavens poured out their punishing floods;
the seas were heated to steam by fiery masses of rock that were summoned
by the divine power from the bowels of the earth. In the course of a
single day the carboniferous forests were swallowed up; the megatheria
disappeared, legs uppermost, like flies in butter, in the sand dunes of
the terrible floods.
The might of the creative act was equalled by the might of the
destruction. The science of these vast new creations and divine
revolutions before Adam’s birth was called geology. It lived in peace
with Linné’s theory of fixed species. Its parent, Cuvier, was so great a
genius that it seemed quite impossible that he had made a mistake.
Before twenty years were out he was, in the opinion of a contemporary
and equally able geologist, declared to be certainly wrong on one point.
Lyell wrote a magnificent work in which he proved, from the point of
view of scientific geology, that the whole story of these terrible
revolutions was a fiction. There are no such sharp sections in the early
history of the earth. Everything goes to show that throughout the whole
period of the earth’s development the same natural laws have been at
work as we find to-day. It is true that the relative positions of sea
and land, hill and valley, forest and desert, have often changed; but
very, very slowly, in the course of millions of years. A single drop of
water, constantly falling, will hollow out a stone. In these millions of
years the water has swept away rocks here, and formed new land by the
accumulation of sand there. In these millions of years the sand has been
compressed into the gigantic masses that tower above us to-day as
sandstone mountains; they are formed of sand that was originally laid
like mud, layer by layer, on the floor of the ocean.
It was all very plausible; it seemed to picture an eternal flow of
things in which there was no room for God. The changes in the earth’s
surface were easily brought about without catastrophes, in the course of
incalculable ages. God was excluded from geological discussions of the
formation of hill and dale. And when it was fully realised, it brought
the question of species to the front once more.
It was impossible to retreat simply to Linné’s position. Lyell by no
means denied Cuvier’s various periods in the earth’s development as
such. He believed, moreover, that the plant and animal populations were
different in these epochs. When the forests flourished which have formed
the mass of our coal-measures there were no ichthyosauri; when the
ichthyosauri came there were no longer any carboniferous forests; with
the ichthyosauri there were no megatheria, and the last ichthyosaurus
was extinct before the megatheria arrived. All that Lyell rejected was
the great divine catastrophes. But when these were abandoned, it was no
longer possible to attribute the “end” of the extinct species to a
divine act. We were faced with the slow and natural conversion of
terrestrial things in the course of endless ages.
Species must have been liable to be destroyed by purely natural causes.
The catastrophes were abandoned, yet species _had_ been destroyed. And
when that was granted—it was the devil’s little finger—a further
conclusion was inevitable. If species have died out slowly and naturally
in the history of the earth, and new species have made their appearance
at the same time, may not these new species have _arisen_ slowly and
naturally? Suppose these simple and purely natural causes, that had
brought about the extinction of certain species, had been for others the
very starting-point of development? In one word: if the extinction was
not due to a mighty divine interference, was it not conceivable that the
origin also may not have needed such?
One more deduction, and the demon of knowledge had hold of the entire
hand. May not this natural extinction and natural new-birth have been
directly connected in many cases? As a fact, some of the species had
been wholly extirpated. But others had provided the living material of
the new arrivals; they had been _transformed_ into these apparently new
species. That was the decisive deduction. It did away with the need of
any sudden creation. It merely made a claim that was appalling to the
Linnean principles: namely, that species may change. In the course of
time and at a favourable spot one species may be transformed into
another.
Another fairly obvious deduction could be made. Who brought about the
transformation? Lyell proved that, without any catastrophes, terrestrial
things are constantly changing—the water and the land, the mountains and
the valleys, and even the climate. In this gradual change the
environments of living things were at length altered to such an extent
that they were bound to cause a change in the organisms. However,
different species reacted in different ways. Some gradually died out.
Others adapted themselves to the new conditions; just as, in human
affairs, one race breaks down under changed conditions while another
rises to a higher and richer and new stage on that very account. No
creation! Merely transformations of species, development of new forms
from older ones by adaptation to new, naturally modified conditions.
Even zoology and botany were without the finger of God from the earliest
days.
Of course there was no trace of these latter deductions in Lyell. But
they pressed themselves with an irresistible and decisive force on the
mind of one of his first readers, Darwin.
He took Lyell’s book with him to South America. Step by step the logic
of it forced him to admit that this was what must have taken place
somewhere. First the idea of “extinct species” became a concrete picture
to him there, a sort of diabolic vision. The whole substratum of the
pampas is one colossal tomb of strange monsters. The bones lie bare at
every outcrop. Megatheria, or giant-sloths, as large as elephants, and
with thighbones three times as thick as that of the elephant, able to
break off branches in the primitive forests with their paws: armadilloes
as big as rhinoceroses, with coats as hard as stone and curved like
barrels; gigantic llamas, the macrouchenias, compared with which the
modern specimens are Liliputians; mastodons and wild horses, of which
America was entirely free even in the days of Columbus, and lion-like
carnivores with terrible sabre-teeth. There they all are to-day—extinct,
lost, buried in the deserted cemetery of the pampas-loam.
When the young Darwin stood by these groves, like Hamlet, he did not
know how closely this ghost-world came to our own day. At that time the
armour of the gigantic armadillo, the glyptodon, that had formed
shelters over the heads of the human dwellers in the pampas, like
Esquimaux huts, had not yet been discovered. The cave of Ultima
Esperanza in Patagonia had not been searched, and no one had seen the
red-haired coat of the sloth as large as an ox, the gryptotherium (a
relative of the real megatherium), cut by some prehistoric human hand,
amongst a heap, several yards deep, of the animal’s manure—in such
peculiar circumstances as to prompt the suggestion that the giant-sloths
had been kept tame in the cavern, as in a cyclopean stable, by
prehistoric Indians. Darwin thought the remains were very old, though
this by no means lessened the inspiration.
As our geological Hamlet speculated over these bones of extinct
monsters, the ideas of Linné and Cuvier struggled fiercely in his mind
with the new, heretical ideas inspired by Lyell. How was it that these
ancient, extinct animal forms of America resembled in every detail and
in the most marked characteristics certain living American animals?
Before him were the relics of past sloths, armadilloes, and
giant-llamas. In the actual America, also, there were sloths,
armadilloes, and llamas, though with some difference. And nowhere else
on earth, either in past or present time, were there sloths,
armadilloes, and llamas. Cuvier had replied, God had pleased to create
those ancient megatheria, glyptodons, and macrouchenias of America.
Then, one day, he sent his destructive catastrophe, and swept them all
away, as a sponge goes over the table. Then, in the empty land, he
created afresh the sloths, armadilloes, and llamas of to-day. But why
had God made the new animals so like the old that the modern zoologist
has to class the megatherium in the same narrow group as the actual
sloth, the ancient glyptodon with the modern armadillo, and so on?
Darwin, who had studied theology, was unshaken with regard to God
himself. However, something occurred that occurs so often and with such
good result in the history of thought. It appeared to him that the
notion of a direct creation is by no means the simplest way of
explaining things, but the most puzzling and complicated. Darwin
believed in Lyell. There had been no destructive catastrophe at all to
sweep away the megatherium and its companions. They had disappeared
gradually, by natural means. Was it not much more rational to suppose
that the actual sloths and armadilloes came into being gradually, by
natural means? Part of the old animal population had not perished, but
been transformed into the actual species. There was a bond of
relationship between the past and the present. One or other grotesque
and perhaps helpless giant form may have completely disappeared in the
course of time. But the golden thread of life was never entirely broken.
Other and more fortunate species had preserved the type of the sloth,
the armadillo, and the llama; they had developed naturally into the
living animals of America. God might remain at the groundwork of things.
He had launched matter into space, and impressed natural laws on it. But
these sufficed for the further work. They created America. They
developed the mammal into the sloth and the armadillo in the days of the
megatherium and the glyptodon. They maintained these types in the
country, in a straight line of development; the progressive principle of
life bringing about the extinction of certain forms, and transforming
others by a more fitting adaptation to their environment.
Darwin always looked back on this first conflict of his ideas in
presence of the dead shells and bones of the ancient pampas animals as
an hour of awakening. It was the birth of his humanity in the higher
sense. It is of interest to us because it coincides exactly with the
date of Haeckel’s birth in the ordinary sense.
In Darwin’s fine account of his voyage, which is mostly arranged in the
form of a diary, we find a passage written on the east coast of
Patagonia on January 9, 1834, and the next on April 13th. In the
meantime the ship had made a short zigzag course, which is spoken of in
another connection. But the interval between the two dates is taken up
with a passage on these gigantic animals, the reasons for their
extinction and the striking fact of their bodily resemblance to the
living animals of South America. “This remarkable resemblance,” we read,
“between the dead and the living animals of one and the same continent
will yet, I doubt not, throw more light on the appearance of organic
beings on the earth than any other class of facts.” This is clearly a
summary of Darwin’s deepest thoughts at the time. Haeckel was born on
February 16th of the same year, 1834. Thus the bodily birth of one of
the two men whom we conceive to-day as Dioscuri coincides with the
spiritual rebirth of the other. But it would be nearly thirty years
before they would meet in spirit never to part again. At the very
beginning of their acquaintance Darwin wrote a letter to Haeckel
(October 8, 1864) in which he speaks of the earliest suggestions of his
theory. The Hamlet-hour comes back vividly to his memory. “I shall never
forget my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour, like
that of a living armadillo. As I reflected on these facts and compared
others of a like nature, it seemed to me probable that closely related
species may have descended from a common ancestor.”
However we take it, Darwin then saw for the first time that his
difficulty about the mutability of species was from the first, in his
own mind, a difficulty about God. He began his doubts with the ancient
armadillo; he ended with God.
On the return journey from South America, which amounted to a
circumnavigation of the globe, the struggle was renewed at the Galapagos
islands. Volcanic forces had raised these islands from the bed of the
ocean in comparatively recent times. They were, therefore, bound to be a
virgin province at the time. Now, however, the walls of the crater were
clothed with vegetation, birds flew after insects, and gigantic turtles
and lizards lived on the shores. Whence did these plants and animals
come? Darwin examines them. They have an unusual appearance, and seem to
point to America. Yet not a single species is now wholly American; each
has its peculiarities. An historical controversy arises over the
islands, and men range themselves in parties once more. Empty islands
emerge from the blue waters. How are they to be populated? There are two
possibilities. One is that God has created the animals and
plants—Galapagos animals and plants. But in that case why has he created
them entirely on the American model, while diverging from it in small
details? The second possibility is that the animals and plants were
brought by the current or the wind from the neighbouring American coast;
they are American plants and animals. After landing on the islands, they
adapted themselves to their new surroundings, and were altered. Hence
both the resemblance and the difference. The theory assumes, of course,
that species are mutable. If that is so, we can explain
everything—without God.
But the greatest and tensest struggle began when Darwin returned home.
He approached the most audacious, but most striking fact, for his
purpose. Up to this the question had been whether new species were
produced by God or by natural necessity. Now a third element was
introduced, man himself. He also alters species, as a breeder of
pigeons, rabbits, sheep. He has done it with success for ages—only the
Linnés and Cuviers had not noticed the fact. How does he accomplish it?
A breeder desires to give his sheep finer wool. He examines the wool of
a thousand sheep. The difference between them is so slight that it is of
no practical consequence. But the farmer selects the male sheep out of
the thousand that has the best quality of wool, and the corresponding
female. He crosses the two. Their young have wool of a slightly improved
quality, and he picks out the best amongst them once more for crossing.
He continues this through several generations. At last, with his
continuous selection and crossing, the quality of the wool increases so
much that any one can recognise it at once, and it has a distinct
cultural value. In this way improved races of animals and large numbers
of fine flowers have been produced by breeders: by artificial selection
of the fittest to reproduce in each generation. This was done by man—not
by God, not by nature in remote times, but under our very eyes, by man.
Now for an analogous process without man. Let our sheep live wild in any
country. No human breeder has any interest in them: God does not seem to
interfere with them. They live on and on, for thousands of years,
generation after generation. Here again, in the wild state, we find the
same slight variations in the quality of the wool. One sheep has a
thicker coat than another. For thousands of years the fact is without
significance. Then occurs a slow change of the environment. The climate
becomes colder. Perhaps an ice-age sets in, such as our earth seems to
have passed through many times. There are two alternatives. A very hard
winter may set in at once and all the sheep perish, because their woolly
coat is too thin in all cases. That would mean the extinction of a whole
species. But the severe cold may come on gradually. The winters are more
trying. So many sheep perish in the first winters; but so many others
survive. Which will survive? Naturally, those that happened to have the
thicker coats. Those alone live on to the spring, and reproduce. The
following year the coat is thicker all round, as the lambs all came from
relatively thick-coated parents. The winter decimates them again, and
the thickest coated survive once more, and so on. The pressure of
external conditions, the “struggle for life,” selects just as man does.
Only the best adapted individuals survive and reproduce.
The whole earth is a vast field of splendid adaptations. The tree-frogs
are green because only green frogs are preserved; all the others are
destroyed. The arctic hare is white on the snow, the desert-fox yellow.
For a thousand reasons in the course of the earth’s development these
backgrounds—white, yellow, green; snow, desert, forest, &c.—have
themselves been constantly changing under the action of Lyell’s changes
in the crust of the earth. Hence constantly fresh adaptations, with a
certain percentage of complete extinctions. In these ceaseless new
adaptations we see a picture of an eternal progressive development.
Always a finer selection: always better material: natural things always
selecting and being selected. Man is superfluous in this world-old,
eternal process. And God, too, is superfluous.
That was Darwin’s last and decisive thought. Divine action was excluded
from the whole province of animal and plant species. It does not matter
whether or no the shrewd idea of natural selection solves the whole
problem. Why speak of “whole,” when all problems are really
unfathomable? He left open the question of the origin of the first
slight variations, the first increase in the fineness or thickness of
the sheep’s wool, for instance. He left open the question of the inner
nature of the process—and a good deal more. But these things did not
affect the great issue.
What Darwin did was to show for the first time how we might conceive the
natural evolution of species; to suggest that the miracle of the
purposive adaptation of organisms to their environment could be
explained by purely natural causes without introducing teleological and
supernatural agencies to bring the disharmony into harmony. The older
mind and logic had seen the action of God everywhere; the new thought
and logic were gradually restricting his sphere. Darwin took away a
whole province from the teleologist when he merely set up the idea of
selection. He towered above himself in that moment. Natural philosophy
wrested zoology and botany from the hands of Linné and Cuvier. It
destroyed the old idea of a design in the interest of natural law and
the general unity of nature. “Allah need create no more.” We cannot
emphasise it too much: it was the conceivability that settled the
question. Darwin had shown that “it might have been so,” and this
possibility stood for the first time in zoology and botany opposed, with
all the weight of logic, to the other theory, which was no more
understood, but was supplied by imagination to fill a gap—the idea of a
special creation of each animal species, the idea that the green
tree-frog, had been created amongst the foliage just as he was. The
feebler fancy gave way to the better. In this concession lay whole
sciences that would have to be entirely transformed on the strength of
Darwin’s achievement.
Narrow-minded folk have tried to make light of the mere “possibility,”
creating a distinction between truth and logical theory. As if all truth
were not solely in the human mind! What an age can conceive is true to
that age. There is nothing higher in the bounds of time and the
development in which we are involved. All truth and science began for
humanity in the form of possibilities. Copernicus’s theory was only a
possibility when it first came. All that we call human culture has come
of the putting together of thousands upon thousands of these
possibilities, like so many stones. It is no use raising up against it
the figment of “absolute truth.” The main point was that Darwin raised
the conceivability of a natural origin of species by the modification of
older forms, which were driven ceaselessly to new adaptations under the
stress of the struggle for life, to such a pitch that the older
possibility of a creation of each species and its deliberate adaptation
by supernatural action sank lower and lower. It was a pure conflict of
ideas; the greater overcame the smaller—_now_ smaller.
Darwin’s work, the _Origin of Species_, was published on November 24,
1859, after twenty-five years of study. He kept the theory of selection
to himself for more than twenty years. The whole of the young generation
from the beginning of the thirties, to which Haeckel belonged, grew up
without any suspicion of it. Apart from the constant ill-health that
hindered his work, Darwin was tortured with anxiety lest he should be
treated as an imaginative _dilettante_ with his heretical ideas. In the
scientific circles of the middle of the century one was apt to be
disdainfully put down as a windy “natural philosopher” if one spoke of
“the evolution of animal and plant species” and the like. The word had
become the scarecrow of the exact, professional scientific workers; much
as when commercial men exclaim, “Dear me, the man’s a poet.” Hence
Darwin wanted to provide a most solid foundation of research for his
work, and then to smuggle it into the house like a goblin in a jar.
He took his task so seriously that, as Lyell afterwards wrote to him, he
might have worked on until his hundredth year without ever being ready
in the sense he wished. Chance had to intervene, and bring forward one
of the younger men, who almost robbed him of the title of discoverer.
Wallace arrived independently at the idea of selection, and he was
within a hair’s breadth of being the first to publish it. The aged
scholar at Down had to come forward. Then the great book was published,
and Wallace disappeared in its shadow.
In Darwin’s opinion it was only a preliminary extract, and he added many
supplementary volumes as time went on. As a fact it was so severely
elaborated that even the thoughtful layman, possibly with a sympathy for
the idea, was almost, if not wholly, unable to digest the proofs. It had
to be “translated” for the majority of Darwin’s educated countrymen. On
the other hand, this mass of facts was partly strange and new to the
professional biologists. What did so many of the museum-zoologists know,
for instance, of the results and problems of the practical breeder?
“That belongs to the province of my colleague who teaches agriculture,
not to mine.” His proofs were taken indiscriminately from zoology,
botany, and geology. But at that time it was woe to the man that mixed
up the various branches of research. The professor of zoology could not
control the botanical material, and _vice versâ_. There was, in
addition, the general dislike of the natural-philosophical nucleus. It
was impossible to suppose that this very individual book, transgressing
every rule, should at once meet with wide encouragement, or even
ordinary appreciation.
In England Darwin’s repute as a traveller and geologist, and the
personal respect felt for him, had some effect. Then came a small circle
of friends, Hooker, Huxley, even, to some extent, the aged Lyell, who
had seen the manuscript before publication, and had at once started a
more or less brisk propaganda. In the first six months three editions of
the work were sold, so that it was read by a few thousand men. As a rule
there was at that time less dread of “natural philosophy” in England
than elsewhere. But pious minds were alarmed at the “struggle against
God” that was based on the exact data of zoology, botany, and geology.
Darwin had made that the salient point, as a glance at the work shows,
since he closes with a reference to the Deity. He said it was a “grand”
view of the Creator to suppose that he had created only the first forms
of life on the earth, and then left it to natural laws to develop these
germs into the various species of animals and plants. It was prudent to
restrict the theistic conflict. God was merely excluded from the origin
of species. Natural selection did not apply to the further problem of
the origin of the primitive life-forms and of life itself. Theism could
retain them. There was something soothing psychologically in the phrase,
which was often attacked subsequently, and did not represent Darwin’s
later views. It was characteristic of Darwin’s gentle disposition.
He did not start out from the position that God does not exist, and that
we must, at all costs, seek natural causes for the origin of things. He
had not abandoned the idea of the clerical profession because he had
lost belief in God, but because he had more attraction for catching
butterflies and shooting birds. Still a firm theist, he had been
convinced, as a candid geologist, by Lyell’s demonstration that God had
had nothing to do with the moulding of hill and valley or the
distribution of land and water. As a candid zoologist and botanist he
had then convinced himself that the analogous changes in the animal and
plant worlds had needed no divine intervention.
As yet, however, he saw no reason to draw more radical conclusions. He
sought, as far as honour permitted, a certain peace of thought by asking
whether this indirect action of the personal Ruler over such vast
provinces did not enhance the idea of him instead of detracting from it.
Goethe would have been prepared, on his principles, to recognise the
step taken in the direction of natural law as a victory for our
increasing knowledge of and reverence for the Deity. For him a natural
law was the will of God; if natural selection created species, he would
have seen merely the will of God in selection. But Darwin had not yet
advanced so far, and still less could this be expected in his pious
readers.
However, we find a curious confession a few paragraphs before the
theistic conclusion of the book. It runs: “Light will be thrown on the
origin and history of humanity.” Light, that is to say, from the theory
of the transformation of species by natural selection. The words
contained the promise of a new twilight of the gods. In the innocent
days, when the Creator stood in person behind each species of animal and
plant, Linné had seen no great innovation in his defining man as a
definite species, the highest species of mammal. God had created the
polar bear and the hippopotamus, _Genesis_ said, as well as man. That
man had transgressed the command in Paradise, fallen into sin, needed
salvation, and so on, was another matter altogether. With Darwin the
innovation was incalculably important.
On his theory the various species of animals had been developed from
each other, without a new creative act. If man was an animal species in
this sense, he also must have originated from other animals; and that
would be bitter. The phrase shows that Darwin already saw clearly, and
had abandoned his belief in a special creation of man. But this point
was bound to make more bad blood than all the rest put together. God,
now restricted to the direct production of the first living things, had
lost man as well as the animals. Moreover, whatever interpretation was
put upon the Mosaic narrative, the very source of theistic belief, the
Bible, was called into question. How had we come to know of this story
of divine creations? By the Bible, the vehicle of revelation. But this
Bible was the work of man, and man was now well within the bounds of
nature, from which God had been excluded. How could he learn anything
from revelation? The biblical writers had clearly only made conjectures.
Some of them—with regard to Adam, for instance—were certainly incorrect.
There was nothing in the Bible about evolution by means of selection.
Indeed, was not the whole picture of a creating Deity an error? These
thoughts were bound to press upon the religious mind with all their
logical force. When they did so, the very foundations of theology became
insecure, to a far more serious extent than Darwin’s moderate conclusion
suggested. When the book fell on this contentious ground, it was bound,
even if it were only read in the last two pages, to provoke vast waves
of hostility against its heretical zoology and botany, especially in
England.
* * * * *
Haeckel was in Italy when the work—the work of _his_ life, too, as the
sequel shows—was published. We have seen where he was: in sight of the
blue sea, penetrating for the first time into a special section of
zoology, the radiolaria, and making it his own. He was far from
theorising, for the first years of reality were upon him. He returned to
Berlin at the beginning of May, 1860, bringing his study of the
radiolaria, and resolved to publish it in comprehensive form. Here he
learned for the first time that a “mad” work by Darwin had appeared,
that denied the venerable Linnean dogma of the immutability of species.
German official science was now invaded from two sides at once. Haeckel
had returned like a new man from the freshness of Italy; and Darwin’s
work, translated by Bronn, was bringing some slight extract of the
English student’s thoughts, like a draught of old golden wine. They were
bound to meet this time.
The aged Bronn, a German naturalist of distinction and merit, had found
the _Origin of Species_ interesting enough, at least, to deserve the
trouble of translation. But his interest in it was very restricted. He
was one of the thoughtful students of the days following Cuvier, and was
not of the kind to pin his faith to one man. The appearance of the plant
and animal species in the various terrestrial periods, so sharply
separated by Cuvier himself, showed unmistakably an ascent from lower to
higher forms. The fish is placed lower in the system than the mammal. At
a certain period there were fishes living, but no mammals as yet. At
another period the only plants on the earth were of the decidedly lower
group of the cryptogams (ferns, shore-grasses, club-mosses), and these
were succeeded by pines and palm-ferns, and finally by the true palms
and foliage-trees. Cuvier’s theory of creation had to take account of
this. Agassiz, who held firmly to the fresh creation of species in each
new epoch, conceived the Creator as an artist who improved in his work
in the course of time. Each new achievement was better than the
preceding. It was rather a curious idea of the Creator!
[Illustration:
PHOTOGRAPH OF MARBLE BUST BY G. HEROLD.
]
Others, who did not venture to use the idea of Deity quite so naïvely as
Agassiz in zoology and botany, conceived a “law of development” within
life itself. It was a time when belief in a “vital force” was universal.
Living things had their peculiar force, which was not found in lifeless
things. The life-principle might be at work in the law of development.
It would raise living things higher and higher in the succeeding
geological epochs. It was a vague theory, though it purported to cover
not only the fact but the machinery of development. In the course of
ages it brought about the appearance of new species. Those who held this
idea of an immanent law of evolution rejected the older notion of a
personal Deity, putting in an appearance suddenly at the beginning of
the secondary period and creating the ichthyosauri “out of nothing.”
They looked upon Cuvier’s catastrophes, to which Agassiz still clung,
with a touch of Lyell’s scepticism. The “law of evolution” had been the
_deus ex machina_ of the long procession of life-forms. One day a fish
ceased to give birth to little fishes in the manner of its parents. The
“law of evolution” was at work in its ova, and suddenly little
ichthyosauri were developed from them. Thus, again, a lizard was
believed to have engendered young mammals one day. One student would
hold that the transition was quite abrupt in this sense. Another would
think it more gradual, and approach the idea of a slow transformation of
a fish into a lizard, and a lizard into a mammal, or a tree-fern into a
palm-fern, and this into a true palm. At the bottom they were all agreed
that the whole inner law of evolution had nothing whatever in common
with the other laws of nature and was not subordinate to them. They did
not hold an evolution in harmony with the great mechanism of natural
laws. Their principle got astride of natural laws at certain points,
like a little man, and turned them in this or that direction.
Very little philosophic reflection was needed to show that they had
merely replaced the Creator with a word. The older Dualism remained. On
one side was the raw material of the world with the ordinary natural
laws; on the other side a lord and master, the law of evolution, playing
with the laws as it pleased, and moulding the material into new
life-forms in an advancing series. It is true that they no longer
pictured to themselves a venerable being with a white beard creating the
ichthyosauri, but the finger of God remained in the law of evolution,
attenuated into a special and spectral form. The God that acted from
without was banished, but the “impulse from within,” reduced to a mere
skeleton in substance, was put upon the throne.
The advocates of the law of evolution had assuredly done much in
preparing the way for Darwin, as they had insisted that certain advances
in detail were undeniable and built up theories from the chaotic
material provided by special research—especially seeing that some of the
ablest naturalists of the time were amongst them, who determined to
retain speculation in zoology and botany. But, on the other hand, it
cannot be questioned that the confused nature of their fundamental idea,
which, in fact, was not far removed from the theological notion of the
vital force, gave the rigid and “exact” academic workers an apparent
right to reject _all_ speculation on the possibility of an evolution of
species as an unscientific dream. The aged Bronn was in 1860 one of the
most prudent and sober of the advocates of the inner principle of
evolution. He candidly acknowledged that Darwin had struck a severe blow
at the great idea of his life, on one side at least. Darwin’s work not
merely dismissed God to the wings as a personality, but even left no
room for the finger of God, for his spiritual writing on the walls of
the living world. It found evidence of natural laws alone. From them
came, if not life itself, at all events selection, adaptation, and
evolution by virtue of this increasing adaptation—the higher advance
that converted the fish into a lizard and the lizard into a mammal. The
fine old worker, with an age of indefatigable labour behind him, though
he had not got beyond the idea of a “law of evolution,” looked on Darwin
with a mixture of fear and admiration as he cut into the very heart of
these problems. He added amiable notes to the work to the effect that
one would like to go so far, but the distance was intimidating. In fact,
he omitted altogether from his translation the very important phrase
that “light would be thrown on the origin of man.” It would be a
terrible affair, he thought, if the discussion were at once turned on
this. Man himself owing his origin neither to God nor the finger of God,
but to natural selection in the ordinary course of natural laws! It was
not to be thought of. Hence the phrase was struck out, as quite too
extravagant, in his otherwise admirable work.
Bronn had himself become something of a revolutionary amongst his
colleagues by the translation. The rigidly “exact” workers crossed
themselves before the Germanised work. Most of the “evolutionists” in
the older sense had by no means the _bonhomie_ to speak even of a
“possibility” like the patriarch Bronn. From the first Darwin
was—Haeckel was the first to experience it—branded with the anathemas of
the two opposite schools of science in Germany. On the one hand the
rigorous and exact workers declared that his teaching was pure
metaphysics, because it sought to prove evolution and contemplated vast
ideal connections. On the other hand the Dualist metaphysicians
denounced him as an empiric of the worst character, who sought to
replace the great ideal elements in the world by a few miserable natural
necessities. It is significant to find that Schopenhauer, the brilliant
thinker, regarded the _Origin of Species_ as one of the empirical
soapsud or barber books produced by exact investigation, which he
thoroughly despised from his metaphysical point of view. And there were
already (there are more to-day) whole schools of zoology and botany that
looked upon Darwin’s theoretical explanations as unscientific
“mysticism,” “metaphysics,” and “philosophy in the worst sense of the
word.”
Haeckel read the dangerous book at Berlin in May, 1860. “It profoundly
moved me,” he writes to me, “at the first reading. But as _all_ the
Berlin magnates (with the single exception of Alexander Braun) were
against it, I could make no headway in my defence of it. I did not
breathe freely until I visited Gegenbaur at Jena (June, 1860); my long
conversations with him finally confirmed my conviction of the truth of
Darwinism or transformism.”
It was, therefore, in the critical days immediately before or during the
negotiations with Gegenbaur which led to his setting up as a private
teacher at Jena. The names of Darwin and Jena unite chronologically in
Haeckel’s life—two great names that were to bear him into the very
depths of his career, and that have their roots in the same hour.
We may ask what it was in the book that “profoundly moved” the young
student of the radiolaria. The name of Braun only partly explains the
matter, as Braun was an evolutionist of the same type as Bronn. He was
amiably disposed to meet it, but did not openly enter on the new path.
We must go deeper. We then understand it clearly enough, if we recollect
Haeckel’s bent in the last few years.
He had no longer any scruples with regard to religion. The God of
tradition had been entirely replaced in him by Goethe’s God, who did not
stand outside of, but was one with, nature. “There is nothing within,
nothing without: for what is within is without.” There was not a kernel,
God, and a shell, Nature. “Nature has neither kernel nor shell: it is
both together.”
The years spent in southern Italy had certainly helped to bring out as
strongly as possible the contrast between Goethe’s conception and the
conventional idea of God as an extramundane Creator. No surroundings are
more apt to do this than the Romance peoples of the Mediterranean. In
the northern, Protestant countries the ecclesiastical tradition of Deity
has always a spiritual element, a kind of vague resolution into moral
laws, that in some measure approach natural law, though one made by man.
There is no trace of this in Naples and Sicily. The supernatural there
is the saint, the madonna; they penetrate unceasingly into the natural
reality, in every little detail of life and conduct. The antithesis of
the poor cosmic machinery and the ever-present heavenly help and
supersession of it is raised to a supreme height in the popular belief.
Miracles are not relegated to earlier days and ancient books. They are
expected, affirmed, and believed every day. The saint fills the net of
the fisherman as he chases the edible cuttle-fishes by torchlight. The
saint makes the storm that threatens the boat—makes it suddenly out of
nothing. The madonna can arrest in a second the glowing stream of lava
that rolls towards the village from Vesuvius, and if hundreds of them
unite in ardent prayer and the making of vows, she will be appeased and
do it. Every hair on a man’s head is twofold; there is the natural hair
and a hair that can at any moment be changed, transformed, annihilated,
or created afresh from nothing, by divine power. The man who has lived
in this atmosphere of practical Dualism for years must be saturated to
his innermost being with a feeling of the absolute contradiction between
this conception of God and nature and Goethe’s philosophy. If he is to
follow Goethe, this ancient extramundane, ever-interfering Deity must be
given up without the least attempt at compromise.
Thus Haeckel’s position was incomparably more radical than Darwin’s from
the very first. He no longer believed in a Creator, either in whole or
part.
He asked himself, therefore, how he could now explain certain things in
nature. He had learned from the great Johannes Müller that species were
unchangeable, and it was impossible to conceive the spontaneous
generation of the living from the dead. The essence, the predominant
element of the living thing was the mysterious, purposive “vital force.”
The first of these three ideas of the master’s to be surrendered
entirely by him was the vital force. Even in Müller’s lifetime, and in
his own laboratory, so to say, his pupil, Du Bois-Reymond, made the
first great breach in the doctrine with his famous study of animal
electricity, a really pioneer piece of work, especially as regards
method, at that time. It was now more than ever probable that there was
no more a special vital force besides the simple natural forces than
there was a God distinct from nature. The animal or the plant was a
wonderful outcome of the same laws that had built the crystal or the
globe. The sharp distinction between living and dead matter fell into
the waste-basket, where so many other Dualistic tags lay, cut off by the
shears of science.
But if one of Müller’s theses was abandoned, another was retained as a
real blessing with all the more tenacity by his pupils—the thesis that
even the scientific investigator shall always “think”—nay, even
“philosophise.” Müller called it “using one’s imagination,” in his
desire to emphasise it. Now it was certainly a fair philosophic
deduction from Du Bois-Reymond’s discoveries that one ought no longer to
be so rigid as regards the possibility of spontaneous generation. If the
same natural forces are at work in the organic and the inorganic, the
living and the dead, it is no longer inconceivable theoretically that
life and inorganic matter only differ in degree, not in kind. The
distinction might become so slender—either now, or at least in past
times—that an apparent “spontaneous generation” might really take place.
Here again, it is plain, Haeckel had a greater freedom than Darwin.
Working gradually from above, Darwin desisted when he came to
spontaneous generation, and left room for God. Haeckel came into an open
field, believing that there was no eternal Deity and that spontaneous
generation itself was by no means a forbidding conception. The problem
for him was merely, how he could work upward through the plants and
animals of all geological periods until he reached man. He was bound to
seek to dispense even here with the historical vital force, and explain
everything by the great natural laws of the cosmos.
It was in this frame of mind that he received Darwin’s book. Can it be
in the least surprising that it “profoundly moved” him. It opened out to
him the whole way, just as he desired it. Müller’s third thesis, the
immutability of species, broke down. But what did it matter? It was now
possible for the first time to construct a philosophical zoology and
botany in Müller’s sense, without any vital force and without God.
At the same time this rapid and impulsive acceptance of Darwin’s theory
was not merely a decisive moment in Haeckel’s intellectual development;
it was bound to be, even externally, a most important step in his
career. The theistic controversy was forced on his attention. It passed
out of the province of his inmost life, that had hitherto only been
discussed in conversation with intimate friends, into the professional
work of his most serious and public occupation—into zoology, into the
radiolaria at which he had been working for years.
We must realise clearly what it must have meant at that time for a young
zoologist, who wanted to do rigorous professional work and had quickly
decided to settle at Jena in order to begin his career as an official
teacher, to become “a Darwinian” in conviction and open confession. It
might cost him both his official position and his scientific future; and
this at the very moment when he had just secured them, or was in a
better position to secure them. We have here for the first time the open
manifestation of a principle in Haeckel’s life that he had hitherto only
used inwardly, in application to himself. The truth must be told,
whatever it cost. Shoot me dead, morally, materially, or bodily, as you
will: but you will have to shoot the law first.
Darwin’s ominous book had been available in Bronn’s translation for two
years. The German professional zoologists, botanists, and geologists
almost all regarded it as absolute nonsense. Agassiz, Giebel,
Keferstein, and so many others, laughed until they were red in the face,
like a riotous first-night public that has made up its mind as to the
absurdity of the play from the first act, and torment the author as the
cat torments a mouse. Then Haeckel gave to the world his long-prepared
_Monograph on the Radiolaria_ (1862), the work with which he endeavours
to establish—in fact, must establish—his position as an exact
investigator, even amongst the academic scholars of the opposite camp.
All goes very smoothly for many pages of the work. A few traces of
heresy may be detected about page 100. The passage deals with the
relation of organ to individual, in connection with the social species
of radiolaria that live in communities. It is a subject that Haeckel
took up with great vigour later on, as we shall see. Here it affords him
an opportunity to say a word about the general fusion of things in the
world of life, in opposition to our rigid divisions in classification.
Organ and individual pass into each other without any fixed limit. That,
he says, is only a repetition of the relation of the plant to the
animal. We cannot establish any fixed limitations between them. What we
set up as such are only man’s abstractions. In nature itself we never
find these subjective abstract ideas of limitation “incorporated purely,
but always fading away in gradual transitions; here, again, the scale of
organisation rises gradually from the simplest to the most complex, in a
continuous development.” However, these are words that might have been
written by Schleiden or Unger or Bronn before Darwin’s time.
Yet there is something in the work that would have been a jet of
ice-cold water to the Agassizs and Giebels. This brilliant new
“Extraordinary Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological
Museum at Jena University,” as it says on the title-page, accepts Darwin
in a certain unambiguous passage late in the text.
It is necessary to bring to light once more this passage, buried in a
work that is not easily accessible, an expensive technical work
separated from us by four decades now. It is worth doing so, not only on
account of the courage it displayed at the time, but also as a document
relating to the great controversy of the nineteenth century. It is found
on pages 231 and 232, partly in the text, but for the most part in a
note. Immediately after giving the table of classification Haeckel goes
on to say: “I cannot leave this general account of the relationship of
the various families of the radiolaria without drawing special attention
to the numerous transitional forms that most intimately connect the
different groups and make it difficult to separate them in
classification, to some extent.” It is interesting to note that in spite
of our very defective knowledge of the radiolaria it is nevertheless
possible to arrange “a fairly continuous chain of related forms.” He
would like to draw particular attention to this, because “the great
theories that Charles Darwin has lately put forward, in his _Origin of
Species in the Plant and Animal World by Natural Selection, or The
Preservation of the Improved Races in the Struggle for Life_, and which
have opened out a new epoch for systematic biology, have given such
importance to the question of the affinities of organisms and to proofs
of continuous concatenation that even the smallest contribution towards
the further solution of these problems must be welcome.” He then
endeavours in the text, without any more theoretical observations,
practically to construct a “genealogical tree of the radiolaria,” the
first of a large number of such trees in the future. He takes as the
primitive radiolarian a simple trellis-worked globule with centrifugal
radiating needles, embodied in the _Heliosphæra_. “At the same time,” he
says, characteristically, “this does not imply in the least that all the
radiolaria must have descended from this primitive form; I merely show
that, as a matter of fact, all these very varied forms may be derived
from such a common fundamental type.” In other words, once more, it is
_conceivable_—a golden word even long afterwards. The first
“genealogical tree,” a “table of the related families, sub-families, and
genera of the radiolaria,” arranged in order from the higher forms down,
and connected with lines and brackets, comes next. The text deals
thoroughly with the possibility of descent. This closes the first and
general part of the monograph. But there is a long note at this point in
the text, where Darwin’s title is cited, that gives us his first
appreciation of Darwin in detail. It begins: “I cannot refrain from
expressing here the great admiration with which Darwin’s able theory of
the origin of species has inspired me. Especially as this epoch-making
work has for the most part been unfavourably received by our German
professors of science, and seems in some cases to have been entirely
misunderstood. Darwin himself desires his theory to be submitted to
every possible test, and ‘looks confidently to the young workers who
will be prepared to examine both sides of the question impartially.
Whoever leans to the view that species are changeable will do a service
to science by a conscientious statement of his conviction; only in that
way can we get rid of the mountain of prejudice that at present covers
the subject.’ I share this view entirely,” Haeckel continues, “and on
that account feel that I must express here my belief in the mutability
of species and the real genealogical relation of all organisms. Although
I hesitate to accept Darwin’s views and hypotheses to the full and to
endorse the whole of his argument, I cannot but admire the earnest,
scientific attempt made in his work to explain all the phenomena of
organic nature on broad and consistent principles and to substitute an
intelligible natural law for unintelligible miracles. There may be more
error than truth in Darwin’s theory in its present form, as the first
attempt to deal with the subject. Undeniably important as are the
principles of natural selection, the struggle for life, the relation of
organisms to each other, the divergence of characters, and all the other
principles employed by Darwin in support of his theory, it is,
nevertheless, quite possible that there are just as many and important
principles still quite unknown to us that have an equal or even greater
influence on the phenomena of organic nature. This is the first great
attempt to construct a scientific, physiological theory of the
development of organic life and to prove that the physiological laws and
the chemical and physical forces that rule in nature to-day must also
have been at work in the world of yesterday.” Haeckel then refers to
Bronn, the translator of the book. With Bronn he calls Darwin’s theory
the fertilised egg from which the truth will gradually develop; the pupa
from which the long-sought natural law will emerge. And he concludes:
“The chief defect of the Darwinian theory is that it throws no light on
the origin of the primitive organism—probably a simple cell—from which
all the others have descended. When Darwin assumes a special creative
act for this first species, he is not consistent and, I think, not quite
sincere. However, apart from these and other defects, Darwin’s theory
has the undying merit of bringing sense and reason into the whole
subject of the relations of living things. When we remember how every
great reform, every important advance, meets with a resistance in
proportion to the depth of the prejudices and dogmas it assails, we
shall not be surprised that Darwin’s able theory has as yet met with
little but hostility instead of its well-merited appreciation and test.”
There is yet no question of man and his origin. But what he says is very
bold for the time; and before a year is out we shall find him drawing
the most dangerous conclusion of all. And it is found, not in a late
page and note in a stout technical volume, but in the pitiless glare of
the sunlight, in the most prominent position that could then be given to
it in German scientific culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------