Darwin

By Gamaliel Bradford

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Title: Darwin

Author: Gamaliel Bradford

Release Date: May 19, 2023 [eBook #70803]

Language: English

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By Gamaliel Bradford


DARWIN. Illustrated. A NATURALIST OF SOULS. THE SOUL OF SAMUEL
PEPYS. Illustrated. DAMAGED SOULS. Illustrated. AMERICAN PORTRAITS.
Illustrated. A PROPHET OF JOY. PORTRAITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN.
Illustrated. PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. Illustrated. UNION PORTRAITS.
Illustrated. CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS. Illustrated. LEE THE AMERICAN.
Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK




DARWIN

[Illustration: _Ch. Darwin_ (signature)]




DARWIN

BY

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration: Decoration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1926




COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




TO

MARSHALL LIVINGSTON PERRIN

WHO TAUGHT ME TO WRITE

AND TO THINK




_On se lasse de tout sauf de comprendre_ SAINTE-BEUVE (from Virgil?)




CONTENTS


I. THE OBSERVER 3

II. THE THINKER 44

III. THE DISCOVERER 83

IV. THE LOSER 128

V. THE LOVER 168

VI. THE DESTROYER 208

VII. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 248

INDEX 307




ILLUSTRATIONS


CHARLES DARWIN _Frontispiece_

Photograph taken in 1881 by Elliott & Fry, London, reproduced in
_More Letters of Charles Darwin_


CHARLES DARWIN AS A CHILD WITH HIS SISTER CATHERINE 4

From a chalk drawing reproduced in _Emma Darwin: A Century of Family
Letters_


THE BEAGLE LAID ASHORE FOR REPAIRS AT RIVER SANTA CRUZ, PATAGONIA 14

From _Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_


DOWN HOUSE FROM THE GARDEN 44

From a woodcut in _The Century Magazine_ reproduced in _Life and
Letters_


FACSIMILE OF A PAGE FROM A NOTEBOOK OF 1837 88

From _Life and Letters_


THE STUDY AT DOWN 128

From a woodcut in _The Century Magazine_ reproduced in _Life and
Letters_


EMMA DARWIN AT THIRTY-ONE 190

From the portrait painted by George Richmond, R.A., reproduced in
_Emma Darwin_


CHARLES DARWIN ABOUT 1854 248

Photograph by Maull & Fox, reproduced in _More Letters_




DARWIN




CHRONOLOGY


CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN

Born, Shrewsbury, February 12, 1809.

At Edinburgh University, 1826.

At Cambridge, 1827-1831.

Absent with the Beagle, 1831-1836.

Married Emma Wedgwood, January 29, 1839.

Settled at Down, in Kent, 1842.

‘The Origin of Species’ published, November 24, 1859.

‘The Descent of Man’ published, February 24, 1871.

Died, Down, April 19, 1882.




DARWIN




CHAPTER I

THE OBSERVER


I

Any formal life of Darwin should be written by a thoroughly trained
and equipped scientist, and indeed no such life could be better than
that written by Darwin’s son forty years ago. But one who, without
special scientific qualifications, is profoundly interested in the
characters and souls of men, all men, may perhaps be justified in
making an intimate study of a man whose influence upon other men, for
good and evil both, has been enormous, and who was himself one of the
simplest, purest, noblest, most candid, most lovable, most Christian
souls that ever lived.

By an extraordinary coincidence Charles Robert Darwin was born in
Shrewsbury, England, on the same day, February 12, 1809, on which
Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Darwin belonged
to an excellent old English family on his father’s side and his
mother was one of the Wedgwoods, of ceramic fame. His paternal
grandfather, Erasmus, was a physician, a poet, and a scientist.
Darwin’s father was an able and successful physician. He would have
liked his son to be the same, but the son had not the taste for it.
Failing medicine, the church was considered, but seemed equally
unpromising. Education at Edinburgh and at Cambridge did not yield
very much. In those days the classics were the basis and this boy had
little interest in the classics. He liked field sports and outdoor
life. Above all, he liked animals and plants, liked to observe and to
describe them, and to record his observations, and this interest grew
more and more absorbing.

[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN AS A CHILD

With his sister Catherine]

In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Darwin obtained the position of
naturalist on the government ship, Beagle, and for five years he was
absent from England, exploring the southern hemisphere and carefully
recording his observations on every sort of scientific subject, which
were later published in his printed journal. Soon after his return
home, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a noble and charming
woman, and a little later, in 1842, he settled at the small village
of Down, in the county of Kent, and made his home there until his
death in 1882. He inherited a considerable property, which was
later increased from his books. He had a large family of sons and
daughters, ten in all, and his life was half chronic invalidism and
half intense devotion to scientific study and thought, or rather, the
two elements were inextricably intertwined.

As a result of his observations on the Beagle, Darwin became
possessed with the idea, which of course had occurred to various
thinkers before him, from the Greeks to Lamarck, that life had not
been created in distinct manifold forms, but had developed in all
its variety, including even man, from a few forms, or even from one.
To entertain the idea in the abstract was comparatively simple; but
to explain the process of development was the puzzle, until Darwin
hit upon what seemed to him the clue in what he called ‘natural
selection,’ or, as Spencer termed it, ‘the survival of the fittest.’
For twenty years Darwin patiently worked out experimental proof of
this theory, and then in 1859 he published ‘The Origin of Species,’ a
book which is generally admitted to be one of the most important in
the whole history of science. During the remaining twenty years of
his life he devoted himself to endless further experiment, and the
results were embodied in numerous volumes, chief among which was ‘The
Descent of Man.’ His views were from the first the subject of fierce
controversy, and in many details they are still so, and will continue
to be. But it may safely be said that in the scientific world the
evolution of life, or more technically, modification by descent,
which is so inseparably associated with Darwin’s name, is an accepted
principle, and Darwin himself had the great and satisfying triumph
of living until this acceptance was perceived to be general, if not
universal. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the last
resting-place of Newton.

The basis, or at any rate one of the most fundamental elements of
Darwin’s character, was the instinct and habit of observing the
external world, and we can best approach him by considering this
habit in others and in him. It is astonishing how little most of us
see. We live in a world of shadows and dream outlines, piecing out
reality by convenient abstractions, which pass in memory like worn
current counters, with little resemblance to actual fact. A tree to
us is vaguely a tree: the structure of its bark, the shape of its
leaves do not enter our world. A man and a woman are simply—a man
and a woman. Unless we are specially called upon to do so we do not
note details of feature or gesture or garment. This vagueness, this
abstraction of vision, is what Théophile Gautier referred to in his
celebrated phrase, ‘I am a man for whom the visible world exists.’[1]
And he amplified his idea by saying that of twenty-five persons who
come into a room, twenty-four will go out and not be able to tell you
the color of the wall-paper, whereas he could tell that and pretty
much everything else. To such an observing temperament life is a
matter of visual detail, of sensuous detail of every kind.

There are people who look out and people who look in, and of course
there are all sorts of degrees between the two extremes. Some people
are wholly preoccupied with their own inner life, their thoughts,
their emotions, their experiences. It is only by the pressure of
necessity that they force themselves into connection with the world
about them, and then it is under protest, and their thoughts leap
back, as by a spring, to internal matters, as soon as the pressure is
removed. Others live in the swift, diverting movement of the external
world and lose their own destiny and almost their identity in the
play of it. ‘Let me alone to observe till I turn myself into nothing
but observation,’ says the old poet.[2] The observation may be for
a serious scientific purpose. It may be for endless entertainment
and pure, inexhaustible delight. As Sterne has it: ‘What a large
volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life
by him who interests his heart in everything and who, having eyes to
see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he
journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can _fairly_ lay his hands
on.’[3]

As there are some persons who naturally observe, so there are some
who observe certain things, and not others. Women are apt to be more
acute observers than men: their senses are more keen and their minds
less preoccupied. But their vision is usually limited to the things
that interest them. A woman will go into a friend’s house and tell
you every detail of furnishing, will describe the friend’s dress with
finished minuteness. But she may take a walk through the fields and
not be able to remember a single flower or insect. On the other hand,
very great scientists will not miss a spider in the grass, but the
color of a ribbon may escape them.

From another point of view observation may be deliberately exclusive.
A trained observer may find that general vision distracts him, and
that to follow up his special object it is necessary to put all other
sights and sounds out of consideration entirely. Bradford Torrey used
to say, and no doubt it is the experience of all naturalists, that
if he went to look for a special flower, he saw flowers only, and was
quite oblivious to birds, while on bird days a rare blossom might be
passed unnoticed.

Naturally the most common matter of observation, the one which is
more or less forced upon the attention of all of us, is humanity.
We may be indifferent to trees and stones, but our pleasure, our
labor, our existence depend upon a more or less constant study of
the human beings whose existence interlocks at every point with
ours. Therefore, from the earliest times of record there have been
profound observers of humanity, persons who have examined the human
aspect and the human heart, as read through that aspect, with the
most persistent zeal and the most unwearying delight. In the vivid
phrase of one of the most acute of these, ‘I glutted myself with
observation.’ And even those of less gormandizing tendency find the
analysis of the human subject one of the most inexhaustible pleasures
that this world affords. All through the study of Darwin I shall
have occasion to refer to one of Darwin’s contemporaries who in a
different line of research was an equally brilliant and significant
exemplification of the scientific spirit, Sainte-Beuve. As Darwin
devoted years upon years to patient investigation of the secrets of
the natural world, so Sainte-Beuve with the same patience, the same
labor, the same infinite and ever-varied curiosity, probed human
hearts, all sorts of human hearts, and portrayed them with unfailing
accuracy and sympathy. He said of himself, using the strictly
scientific expression: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of
souls.’[4]

But in dealing with Darwin we are in the main concerned with the
field of so-called natural science, with the varying aspects of the
material world, which we are apt to sum up under the term, nature.
General observation of this world is, of course, also as old as man.
Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, all ancient records, contain scientific
facts of importance and interest to-day. Sophocles and Vergil had an
exquisite sense of the exact beauty of birds and flowers. The vision
of Chaucer and Shakespeare was as acute as that of Gautier, so far
as they chose to employ it. At the same time we must recognize that
with the middle of the eighteenth century a new interest in nature
arose. The literature of Rousseau and Cowper, of Keats and George
Sand, reflected the external world in a far different fashion from
anything before imagined, and Linnæus, Cuvier, and many others laid
the foundations of modern scientific study, which the nineteenth
century developed until it overshadowed every branch of learning both
for theoretical abundance and for practical utility.

It must of course be recognized that in many cases the observation of
nature is not practiced for the pure pleasure of it, but serves some
ulterior object or interest. There is first the obvious practical
gain from such observation. Agriculture has undergone a complete
revolution in the last hundred years, and this revolution has been
brought about by the various developments of scientific research.
Darwin’s vast investigations showed the intimate connection between
the theories of the scientist and the practical experiments of the
breeder.

On the other side there is the observation of the artist. Ruskin
pointed out long ago, how fine, how subtle, how delicate was the
vision of the great painters, how perfect their skill in rendering
the exact sense impression of natural objects. In the same way, it is
not often considered what wealth of accurate record we have in the
poets and novelists. Gautier, for whom the visible world existed, was
a poet. He saw shapes and contours and colors, saw them to render
them in words that interpreted as perfectly as words can. The great
French novelists who followed Gautier and learned from him were
in the same way admirable observers and recorders. Darwin himself
did not scorn to use the observation of the English novelist Mrs.
Oliphant and he refers to her as ‘an excellent observer.’[5]

But there is such a thing as observation for the pure love of it,
which is used neither to improve the breed of chickens or tomatoes,
nor to make effective and salable copy, nor even to generate and
sustain theories about the organization of the cosmos. There is a
pure, inexhaustible delight in just living with the insects and
the birds, in merging one’s own existence, one’s own soul in the
mysterious abundance and ecstasy of the universal life, without
thought of any ulterior object to be achieved in any way whatsoever.
White of Selborne felt nature in this fashion. So did Richard
Jefferies. So did the French naturalist and observer, Fabre. I know
few works that have more of the charm of personal delight than
Bates’s ‘Naturalist on the Amazons,’ a book which I have read and
re-read and shall read again. Bates was interested in the Darwinian
theories and worked at them. But his passion for the forest life
was quite independent of any theories and it is expressed with an
engaging, absolute simplicity, without the slightest pretence at
literary ornament or effect.

Our supreme American example of this life in nature, and perhaps
the supreme example anywhere, is Henry Thoreau. Thoreau had his
speculations, and some persons relish them. But it seems as if
no other human being had ever left the record of such complete
self-abnegation in the external world as Thoreau’s. His soul not
only turns to that of the birds and flowers, it is that of the birds
and flowers, and he is never, never making observations to serve a
purpose. He is simply existing in the universal existence for the
joy of it: ‘I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many
springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else
to do but _live_ them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for
me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers
chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when
they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing
the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude
and poverty!’[6]


II

Of the numerous records of simple natural observation and experience
few are more charming than Darwin’s ‘Journal of the Voyage of the
Beagle,’ in which he notes what he saw and heard by land and sea
during those years of adventure in the southern hemisphere. All
through this book, as indeed in all his books, it is evident that
the instinct and habit of observing were inborn and constant, and
all those who write about Darwin make this instinct at least the
foundation of his scientific eminence.

[Illustration: THE BEAGLE LAID ASHORE FOR REPAIRS AT RIVER SANTA
CRUZ, PATAGONIA]

Asa Gray, who had given his life to botany, writes: ‘What a skill
and genius you have for these researches! Even for the structure of
the flower of the Ophyrideæ I have to-night learned more than I ever
knew before.’[7] Professor Osborn says, more generally: ‘Rare as
were his reasoning powers, his powers of observation were of a still
more distinct order. He persistently and doggedly followed every
clue; he noticed little things which escaped others; he always noted
exceptions and at once jotted down facts opposed to his theories.’[8]
And the editors of Darwin’s letters put the whole matter with concise
effectiveness in speaking of ‘that supreme power of seeing and
thinking what the rest of the world had overlooked, which was one
of his most striking characteristics.’[9]

Darwin’s own comments on observation are frequent and most
interesting. Little inclined as he was to self-praise, in the
charming autobiographical sketch which begins the ‘Life,’ he frankly
states his merits in this regard: ‘I think that I am superior to the
common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention,
and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as
great as it could have been in the observation and collection of
facts.’[10] Exact, systematic, patient study of what is actually
seen seems to him the basis of all great scientific work, and he
repeatedly emphasizes the importance of it. ‘It is well to remember
that Naturalists value observations far more than reasoning.’[11]
Again, ‘I have come not to care at all for general beliefs without
the special facts. I have suffered too often from this.’[12] And
observation is not only a duty, it is a delight. The arrangement
of facts, the deduction of theories from them, thought, reasoning,
argument, these are labor and pain. But to watch the insects and the
flowers, by long and careful attention to make them yield all their
secrets, this is no labor, but an exquisite diversion, which never
fails: ‘A naturalist’s life would be a happy one if he had only to
observe, and never to write.’[13]

It is evident, further, that Darwin’s observation was by no means
confined to natural science, but was quick, acute, and constant in
all the different phases and interests of life. Naturally his books
deal with little besides his scientific work, but the record of the
Beagle shows interest and appreciation of many things outside of
this work altogether. An eye so carefully trained could not fail to
distinguish and perceive all sorts of minute points that others would
pass over. His readiness to note other things besides those he was
looking for shows in the piquant comment on wide experimenting: ‘It
may turn out a mare’s nest, but I have often incidentally observed
curious facts when making what I call “a fool’s experiment.”’[14]

It is especially curious to note Darwin’s observation of himself.
To be sure, he disclaims any philosophical study in this regard: ‘I
have never tried looking into my own mind.’[15] Nevertheless, whether
he tried or not, he was curiously alive to what went on there, and
he records what he finds with the singular candor which appears in
his treatment of his own affairs as well as of others. The very
hesitation with which he speaks of self-analysis increases the value
of his results: ‘If I can analyze my own feelings (a very doubtful
process).’[16] And when he does make a statement, it is all the
more reliable and all the more far-reaching from the moderation and
reserve with which it is advanced.

In one field quite remote from what is usually considered natural
science, that of physiognomy and expression, Darwin’s observation
is especially interesting, though of course he connected this line
of research, as so many others, with his general scientific theory.
His book on ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ is one of the most
entertaining and profitable of all for the general reader, and it is
instructive to note, how early, how persistently, and how faithfully
he collected memoranda on this comparatively collateral issue. The
use of what was immediately about him, of his own personal experience
in daily living, is especially significant in this regard. For the
study of expression he felt that unconsciousness in the subject was
a prime requisite. Hence the study of infants, who were perfectly
indifferent to your investigations, was peculiarly profitable,
and almost from the moment his children were born, Darwin began
to make notes on their expressions of pain and pleasure, all the
little subtle indications of desire and need, which mothers use
instinctively but which fathers are not commonly apt to register as
scientific data. The curious paper, published in _Mind_, called ‘The
Biography of a Child,’ gives many of Darwin’s notes on this subject,
and repeated references in ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ show what
fruitful use he made of those notes at a later period. The minuteness
with which he observed and reflected is well shown in this passage
on childrens’ crying: ‘I ought to have thought of crying children
rubbing their eyes with their knuckles, but I did not think of it,
and cannot explain it. As far as my memory serves, they do not do so
whilst roaring, in which case compression would be of no use.... I
wish I knew more about the knuckles and crying.’[17]

The observation not only records the larger and more violent
manifestations of passion, but is constantly on the watch for those
trifling signs of feeling which appear and flit away in trivial
social intercourse. Take this account of an animated conversation:
‘Another young lady and a youth, both in the highest spirits, were
eagerly talking together with extraordinary rapidity; and I noticed
that, as often as the young lady was beaten, and could not get out
her words fast enough, her eyebrows went obliquely upwards, and
rectangular furrows were formed on her forehead. She thus each time
hoisted a flag of distress; and this she did half-a-dozen times in
the course of a few minutes.’[18]

Nor is he content with his own observations, but in this, as in wider
researches, he perpetually appeals to his friends for assistance,
opens their eyes and sharpens their wits, to see and record matters
which they would assuredly never have thought of for themselves. Note
the care and tact with which he makes his requests: ‘I beg you, _in
relation to a new point for observation_, to imagine as well as you
can that you suddenly come across some dreadful object, and act with
a sudden little start, _a shudder of horror_; please do this once or
twice, and observe yourself as well as you can, and _afterwards_ read
the rest of this note, which I have consequently pinned down.’[19]

It is, however, in the regions of natural science more particularly
so-called that Darwin’s observation is inexhaustibly rich, varied,
exciting, and suggestive. He himself puts it very simply and
effectively, when he says, ‘I was born a naturalist.’[20] At the
age of ten his curiosity was intensely stimulated by the varying
aspects of insects and he considered the desirability of collecting
them. In one of his letters, Darwin gives an amusing illustration of
this youthful enthusiasm for collecting. One day he had caught two
most interesting beetles and was holding one in each hand, when he
discovered a third, ‘a sacred _Panagæus crux-major_!’ ‘I could not
bear to give up either of my _Carabi_, and to lose _Panagæus_ was
out of the question; so that in despair I gently seized one of the
_Carabi_ between my teeth, when to my unspeakable disgust and pain
the little inconsiderate beast squirted his acid down my throat, and
I lost both _Carabi_ and _Panagæus_.’[21]

The delight of observation, which began in childhood, continued to
old age, and increased instead of weakening. When he was fatigued
and worn with writing and theorizing, when illness tormented him
and weakness rendered more concentrated effort impossible, it was a
relief to turn to the simple contemplation of facts, and the budding
and fading of flowers and the varied activity of insects offered
at all times diversion and contentment. Sometimes he dwells upon
the larger aspects of such contemplation, the joy of discovery, the
excitement of finding what has never been found before. Again and
again in his southern voyages this excitement appears: ‘In these wild
countries it gives much delight to gain the summit of any mountain.
There is an indefinite expectation of seeing something very strange,
which, however often it may be balked, never failed with me to recur
on each successive attempt.’[22] Or the pleasure may come in what
seem the humblest, smallest things, in what is to ordinary persons
negligible, or even repulsive. One of Darwin’s most attractive books,
perhaps with ‘The Expression of the Emotions,’ the most attractive
from the casual reader’s standpoint, is that in which he gathers
together the results of his study of earthworms, a study which had
continued through years of patient and thoughtful investigation of a
subject which, even from the naturalist’s point of view, would not
seem one of the most fruitful or engaging.

The fundamental principal of all scientific observation is accuracy,
and no one knew this better than Darwin. No one understood better
than he the subtle, treacherous influences that are always at work,
distracting, impairing, and distorting exact and lucid vision. There
is the danger of seeing what we are accustomed to see and therefore
think we see. There is the danger of seeing what others have seen and
described before us. There is the supreme danger of seeing what we
wish to see, what accords with some preconceived theory or dogma.
Against all these dangers Darwin tried to be ever on his guard,
and he is constantly warning others of them and emphasizing the
importance of pure accuracy and the enormous difficulty of it. ‘Good
heavens, how difficult accuracy is!’[23] Among all the merits of the
scientist he values accuracy highest, the instinct and the ability
to record facts correctly: ‘I value praise for accurate observation
far higher than for any other quality.’[24] And especially in one
admirable passage he stresses and reiterates both the difficulty
and the value: ‘Accuracy is the soul of Natural History. It is hard
to become accurate; he who modifies a hair’s breadth will never be
accurate.... Absolute accuracy is the hardest merit to attain, and
the highest merit.’[25]

Among the various elements of accuracy, that of statement, as well
as of observation, is of course of the utmost importance, yet is too
apt to be overlooked. Even those who are careful in their actual
observing, may in their report of their observations be much less so.
Words are misleading and inadequate things, and the tricks they have
played with scientific accuracy have been deplorable. There is the
strange ease of mere misstatement. There is the natural tendency to
overstate. There is the tendency to clarify verbally what in fact is
more or less confused or the opposite difficulty of making verbally
clear what the senses may perceive with singular lucidity.

Here again Darwin is constantly on the watch. Memory is misleading
and accounts based upon it are apt to be untrustworthy: ‘I foolishly
trusted to my memory, and was much annoyed to find how hasty and
inaccurate many of my remarks were.’[26] Words are inadequate,
blundering, they will not render the finer, more delicate shades: ‘A
difference may be clearly perceived, and yet it may be impossible,
at least I have found it so, to state in what the difference
consists.’[27] One cannot be too careful, too scrupulous, about
one’s statements, or too anxious to correct them, when one has made
a mistake. And Darwin gets up in the middle of the night and arouses
a slumbering friend to explain that, after all, he felt the sense of
the sublime more fully in the forests of Brazil than on the top of
the Cordilleras.[28]

When one is so mistrustful of one’s own records one cannot always
accept implicitly the narratives of others. Darwin is eager to get
the accounts of other observers, and is singularly deferential
to their opinions. At the same time he is gently and watchfully
critical, and knows well how to estimate the ability of those with
whom he deals. One of the most interesting remarks upon the skill
of his methods in obtaining information, and one that every one who
reads him carefully will confirm, is Sir William Turner’s comment
upon ‘his care in avoiding leading questions.’[29]

And if Darwin was insistent upon accuracy in records, he was also
extraordinarily thorough and exact in mathematical matters and
measurement. He speaks of abstract mathematics as having been one of
the neglected elements of his education,[30] but he shunned no amount
of pains and toil in calculating, wherever he felt it necessary to
work out his results. In his books which record the investigation
of detail there is an almost incredible amount of slow and careful
research involving exact counting and weighing and measuring. ‘I
was compelled to count under the microscope above 20,000 seeds of
_Lythrum salicaria_,’ he says casually in one instance,[31] and there
are innumerable others of the same kind. In all these calculations
the possibility of error haunts him and he does his best to eliminate
it, yet still the possibility is there: ‘Although I always am
endeavoring to be cautious and to mistrust myself, yet I know well
how apt I am to make blunders.’[32] If he blundered, what shall be
said of some of us? Most interesting and characteristic is the trait,
pointed out by his son, that he assumed with singular naïveté the
absolute accuracy of the instruments that came to him: ‘He had great
faith in instruments, and I do not think it naturally occurred to
him to doubt the accuracy of a scale or measuring glass.’[33] Yet
further, ‘it was characteristic of him that he took scrupulous pains
in making measurements with his somewhat rough scales.’[34]

As he was exact and particular in calculation and measurement,
so he shrank from no amount of detail, did not hesitate to carry
his investigations to the last point of minuteness, whenever the
full and solid breadth of result demanded it. Apparently nothing
escaped him. It was not only what he was looking for, but he noted
and seized oddities and exceptions for their larger bearing and
for future profit. As his son says, ‘A point apparently slight and
unconnected with his present work is passed over by many a man almost
unconsciously with some half-considered explanation, which is in fact
no explanation. It was just these things that he seized on to make
a start from.’[35] Thus, on any subject that came up, his memory or
his notes could almost always be appealed to. As Sir Thomas Farrer
puts it, ‘What interested me was to see that on this as on almost
any other point of detailed observation, Mr. Darwin could always
say, “Yes, but at one time I made some observations myself on this
particular point; and I think you will find, etc., etc.”’[36]

To appreciate this minuteness and thoroughness, it is necessary to
examine the less known and less popular books, such as the ‘Cross
and Self Fertilization’ and the ‘Different Forms of Flowers.’ In
these one is overwhelmed with Darwin’s persistence in examining and
noting trivial details. And perhaps most impressive of all is to turn
over the pages of the two immensely solid volumes on Cirripedes. For
many years Darwin devoted himself to the study of these unexciting
barnacles, sometimes wearying, sometimes rebelling, but always
keeping at his task until he had completed it. He himself sometimes
wondered whether such prolonged toil at mere description was wholly
worth while; but Huxley believed that the mental discipline was
of the greatest possible profit to Darwin’s later work. In any
case the exhaustive thoroughness of it is indeed exemplary. How
far this goes may be suggested by one quotation out of many: ‘I
cannot too strongly impress on any one intending to study this
class, not to trust to external characters; he must separate and
clean and carefully examine the internal structure and form of the
compartments and more especially of the opercular valves.’[37] And
the examination, in Darwin’s case, applied to hundreds of specimens
of minute barnacles gathered and sent to him from all parts of the
world.

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous amount of labor
implied and involved in all these self-imposed tasks of Darwin.
Although circumstances compelled him to give a large part of his life
to repose, he was by nature a worker. It is true that he sometimes
speaks jokingly of his idleness: ‘I have been of late shamefully
idle, _i.e._, observing instead of writing, and how much better fun
observing is than writing.’[38] But as Huxley well points out, Darwin
generally means by idleness ‘working hard at something he likes when
he ought to be occupied with a less attractive subject.’[39] And
Darwin’s own more serious comment is, ‘I am a pretty man to preach,
for I cannot be idle, much as I wish it, and am never comfortable
except when at work.’[40] He complains of fatigue, he forces himself
to seek recreation, relaxation; but even when his body is at rest,
his mind tends to work, refuses to stop working, finds its only real
relief in change of occupation and thought.

And as the labor is impressive, so is the patience. The man was
naturally nervous, restless, eager. He wanted results, like the rest
of us. Yet after he had conceived a theory which he thought destined
to subvert the whole realm of science, he waited twenty years for the
thorough observation and testing necessary to put the theory into
even tentative form. Of all the great scientific qualities perhaps
patience is the most essential and the most difficult, and surely
patience never had a more supreme exemplar than Charles Darwin.
Sometimes even his enduring persistence is temporarily shaken: ‘My
cirripedial task is an eternal one; I make no perceptible progress.
I am sure that they belong to the hour-hand, and I groan under my
task.’[41] But though he may groan, he never yields. As his son
admirably says of him: ‘He used almost to apologize for his patience,
saying that he could not bear to be beaten, as if this were rather
a sign of weakness on his part.... Perseverance seems hardly to
express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself.
He often said that it was important that a man should know the
right point at which to give up an inquiry. And I think it was his
tendency to pass this point that inclined him to apologize for his
perseverance, and gave the air of doggedness to his work.’[42] The
intensity of such patience is best appreciated by those who all their
lives have scamped and hurried and slighted and touched a thousand
things without ever going to the bottom of a single one.


III

Nothing illustrates better the patience of Darwin, and of course
also of hundreds of other scientists who are working as he worked
in unknown laboratories all over the world, than the process of
simple waiting so often necessary to obtain results. Nature demands
time, often enormous time, and the brevity of human life and the
evanescence of human opportunity mean nothing to her. The careful
working out of scientific investigation requires the study of
successive generations, sometimes of many, the sowing of the seed and
the gathering of the blossom, the close observation of the individual
from conception to death, which can be carried on only through long
periods of time. The observer must keep a dozen lines of study in
his mind, must maintain them side by side, and must be always
ready to turn from one to the other, as some new development arises
that demands his attention. It was in this phase of long, renewed,
continued, enduring watchfulness that Darwin was preëminent. As well
appears in his son’s record: ‘I think it was all due to the vitality
and persistence of his mind—a quality I have heard him speak of as
if he felt that he was strongly gifted in that respect. Not that he
used any such phrases as these about himself, but he would say that
he had the power of keeping a subject or question more or less before
him for a great many years.’[43] Very little examination of Darwin’s
books is required to show how amply and constantly this power was
exercised.

And to give such patience and taste for continuity their full effect
there is needed almost a passion for system, for orderly arrangement,
and the habit of putting not only things but thoughts in their proper
places, so that they can be called upon at the right moment in the
right way. Darwin himself describes his elaborate method of indexing
the books that he read and the notes that he made, so that whenever
he wished to deal with any special subject, he could turn at once to
material bearing upon it: ‘Before beginning on any subject I look to
all the short indexes and make a general and classified index, and by
taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all the information
collected during my life ready for use.’[44]

Such systematic habits of working both demand and imply an orderly
and economical use of time. Owing to his limitations of health,
Darwin’s working time was extremely limited, but he made the most
of it. Every usable hour was allotted, and the utmost profit and
result were extracted from it. No doubt such sense of pressure is
in itself not very beneficial to health, but it means an immense
amount of work accomplished. The time was employed thriftily as well
as intelligently: ‘He saved a great deal of time through not having
to do things twice.’[45] And everywhere there is the feeling of the
value of minutes which is indicated in Dante’s saying,

Chè’l perder tempo, a chi più sa, più spiace.[46]

Or as Darwin himself expresses it: ‘A man who dares to waste one hour
of time has not discovered the value of life.’[47]

Still another element of observation richly illustrated in Darwin,
and closely connected with the patience and the continuity, is the
element of comparison. Observation by itself, the mere accumulation
of curious detail, does not get us very far. Observations must
be bound together, one with another, they must be connected and
related, intertwined into results and conclusions, often remote and
far-reaching, or they do not begin to attain all their possible
significance. In Darwin’s own phrase: ‘As you say, there is an
extraordinary pleasure in pure observation; not but what I suspect
the pleasure in this case is rather derived from comparisons forming
in one’s mind from allied structures.’[48] This more elaborate
process of comparison, however, leads us at once to the methods of
deliberate experiment for a special purpose, and will therefore be
more fully and naturally considered in the next chapter.

As to the more practical side of observation, one is largely
impressed with all the difficulties and drawbacks of it, when pursued
on any considerable scale, and certainly Darwin’s life affords
abundant illustration of these, some peculiar to himself and some of
a more general nature which beset most naturalists more or less.

There are the difficulties that always attend extensive field and
outdoor work. In a voyage such as that of the Beagle, in a small
sailing ship a hundred years ago, there were the elements of actual
danger. Darwin was the last person to enlarge upon his courage in
meeting these or in disregarding them. Of his childhood he says: ‘I
remember how very much I was afraid of meeting the dogs in Barker
Street, and how at school I could not get up my courage to fight:
I was very timid by nature.’[49] But repeated experiences during
the voyage of the Beagle make it evident that the timidity was
overcome by a calm and intelligent comprehension of conditions and
necessities. Perhaps the most interesting illustration is Darwin’s
attitude toward an earthquake in South America: ‘I have had ill luck,
however, in only one little earthquake having happened. I was lying
in bed when there was a party at dinner in the house; on a sudden I
heard such a hubbub in the dining-room; without a word being spoken,
it was devil take the hindmost and who should get out first; at the
same moment I felt my bed _slightly_ vibrate in a lateral direction.
The party were old stagers, and heard the noise which always precedes
a shock; and no old stager looks at an earthquake with philosophical
eyes.’[50]

Worse perhaps than the specific, exceptional dangers were the
constant annoyances and discomforts. Food was often insufficient,
ill-prepared, and indigestible. Cold was wearing and heat was
wearing. There was exposure to all sorts of weather, there was the
torment of insects, there was endless, inescapable fatigue, which
could not be remedied or avoided, but just had to be borne and
forgotten in the excitement of great or even little objects to be
attained. Glimpses here and there, never unduly emphasized, show what
these trials were and how they were met: ‘The road, from some recent
rain, was full of little puddles of clear water, yet not a drop was
drinkable. I had scarcely been twenty hours without water, and only
part of the time under a hot sun, yet the thirst rendered me very
weak. How people survive two or three days under such circumstances,
I cannot imagine.’[51] To put up with discomforts during a camping
trip of a few weeks or months is one thing. To endure them constantly
for five years implies a very pretty enthusiasm for the cause of
science.

Besides these external drawbacks to observation, there are others
more subjective and personal. A minor aspect of these has interested
me, because it shows such a delightful mixture of human feeling
and scientific curiosity. As we shall have occasion to amplify
later, Darwin was remarkable for tenderness, for sympathy, for
affectionate and kindly interest, not only in humanity generally and
in animals, but especially in those directly connected with him.
Yet his investigations of expression led him, forced him, to a calm
and cold-blooded analysis of situations and emotions which at the
same time made the strongest appeal to his sympathies. All through
his children’s infancy he pursued the practice of making notes on
them, yet it is most curious to trace the play of personal emotion
in combination with the abstract research, and the working of this
well appears in his son’s remark: ‘It was characteristic of him that
(as I have heard him tell), although he was so anxious to observe the
expression of a crying child, his sympathy with the grief spoiled his
observation.’[52] A more impersonal example is his careful record
as to a woman whom he studied in a railway carriage, watching with
minute attention the movement of her _depressores anguli oris_, which
appeared to indicate extreme distress: ‘As her countenance remained
as placid as ever, I reflected how meaningless was this contraction,
and how easily one might be deceived. The thought had hardly occurred
to me when I saw that her eyes suddenly became suffused with tears
almost to overflowing and her whole countenance fell. There could
now be no doubt that some painful recollection, perhaps that of a
long-lost child, was passing through her mind.’[53] And so instances
of intense individual suffering became generalized into typical cases
of scientific record.

Far more important, however, in Darwin’s career, as a drawback to
scientific observation, than any intrusions of subjective sympathy,
were the bitter, persistent limitations of physical illness and
weakness. During a very large part of his life he was tormented
by nervous indigestion, manifesting itself, under any strain, in
persistent nausea. This first appeared in the ever-returning and
unconquerable sea-sickness which made all his southern voyages a
misery. When the ocean was at all boisterous the malady prostrated
him, and those who know how absolutely prostrating sea-sickness is
will appreciate the positive heroism which enabled him to prosecute
his journey and his researches with such a handicap.

After his return to England the trouble continued to hound and haunt
him through all his later years. He never could work for more than
a small portion of the day. The excitement of visitors always upset
him. There were long periods when any work was impossible and often
an absorbing investigation had to be laid aside altogether just at
the most critical point, laid aside so completely that not only
actual labor but even thought was prohibited. The idleness which he
detested was forced upon him for a very large part of his days and
hours and the spirit framed for such constant and intense activity
was obliged to discipline itself to the most irksome and profitless
repose.

It made no difference in the intensity or the persistence of his
scientific preoccupations. Perhaps if he had abandoned his pursuits
altogether and had contented himself with an indolent and externally
diversified existence, he might have enjoyed reasonable health. But
he would not yield for a moment. His whole soul was in the studies,
the pursuits, the investigations that enthralled and inspired him,
and life without them would have been inconceivable. ‘We have come
here for rest for me, which I have much needed; and shall remain here
for about ten days more, and then home to work, which is my sole
pleasure in life.’[54] That is the constant note. In the midst of his
travels he wrote home: ‘My mind has been since leaving England, in
a perfect _hurricane_ of delight and astonishment, and to this hour
scarcely a minute has passed in idleness.’[55] The body might lag
and drag and harass and torment, but the spirit lived in just such a
hurricane of excitement and enthusiasm always.


IV

It must be recognized that even in the pure habit of observation for
itself, whether in the natural world or otherwise, there is a charm
for those who are born for it. Curiosity is a natural instinct with
most of us, and there is inexhaustible entertainment in letting the
spirit lie fallow within, while the external world plays upon it with
an endless succession of picturesque incidents and highly colored
circumstance. At the same time, and especially in the realm of
nature, it is astonishing what a difference even a little knowledge
makes. Most of us walk through the fields and woods like blind men,
utterly oblivious of all the fascinating secrets which await our
eyes and ears if we were only alive to them. As one who has always
delighted in solitary wood walks merely for their associative beauty,
I at least can bewail the deplorable ignorance as to plants and birds
and insects which makes it impossible for me even to interrogate
them intelligently. Lack of time or natural indolence have prevented
my accumulating the knowledge which would put all these things in
their proper relations and make them tell a story which the trained
and expert observer instantly and instinctively reads in them. It is
comforting to find even Darwin complaining of the same ignorance
and the same blindness, when he gets into surroundings that are
strange to him. Thus in his earlier voyaging, he notes: ‘One great
source of perplexity to me is an utter ignorance whether I note
the right facts, and whether they are of sufficient importance to
interest others.’[56] And again even more vividly: ‘It is positively
distressing to walk in the glorious forest amidst such treasures and
feel they are all thrown away upon one.’[57]

Then with the coming of a little knowledge the observation is
enriched, transfigured, glorified. Hear what Thoreau says of even the
apparently dry and profitless acquisition of nomenclature: ‘With the
knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge
of the thing. That shore is now more describable and poetic even. My
knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not
used—for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable
and grows by communication.’[58] Knowledge in one branch amplifies
and steadies observation in that branch. Knowledge of many branches
connects them and makes each one throw light on all the others.
Record of others’ observations or of your own through several years
give each new year double significance and fruitfulness. As Thoreau
again puts it: ‘I soon found myself observing when plants first
blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and
near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the
town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty
miles in a day.’[59] If your attention gets fixed upon some special
point to be elucidated, every walk you take, and almost every step
brings out some development which you did not consider or imagine
before. In short the enrichment of knowledge doubles, triples,
quintuples your vision, since it teaches you what to look for, and
even while it sometimes betrays, teaches you what to see.

But if mere general scientific knowledge is so stimulating and so
enlarging in the realm of observation, how infinitely more fruitful
is the Darwinian view of the interrelated development of all life
including that of man. Whatever may be said, whatever we may have
to say later, of the injurious action of this view upon the status
of man himself, there can be no question as to the transforming,
magical effect of it upon the study of the natural world. Before
the evolutionary attitude, the observation of plants and animals
was at best a mere gratification of curiosity. The proper study of
mankind was man, and the investigation of birds and insects was only
distraction and diversion. But the instant it appeared that all the
threads of life were intertwined and that in disentangling even the
slightest of them you might be getting the clue to the riddle of the
whole, all was changed. When it comes to be felt that the history of
man, of his instincts, of his passions, of his powers, of his future,
of his fate, is written in his past, and that past is to be studied,
if at all, in the history of the humblest creatures who are animated
by the same mysterious impulse of life that moulds and governs him,
the interest of natural observation is increased a thousandfold. It
is not exaggerating to say that the study of natural history is an
entirely different pursuit since Darwin from what it was before.

It is evident that Darwin himself was constantly and immensely
impressed by the profound significance thus added to scientific
research. A passage in his earlier note-books shows how the idea was
beginning to take hold of him: ‘If we choose to let conjecture run
wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death,
suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our
companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one
common ancestor—we may be all melted together.’[60]

A striking concrete illustration of the community of life, even in
the humblest forms, appears in the book on earthworms and suggests
Emerson’s poetical version of the same idea,

‘And striving to be man the worm Mounts through all the spires of
form:’

‘It may be well to remember how perfect the sense of touch becomes in
a man when born blind and deaf, as are worms. If worms have the power
of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and
of their burrows, as seems to be the case, they deserve to be called
intelligent; for they then act in nearly the same manner as would a
man under similar circumstances.’[61] While a celebrated passage in
‘The Origin of Species’ develops the idea abstractly, by implication
at least placing man at the apex of the whole: ‘As buds give rise by
growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop
on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it
has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and
broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with
its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.’[62]

Wallace said of his great friend and competitor, ‘Again, both Darwin
and myself had what he terms “the mere passion of collecting”....
I should describe it rather as an intense interest in the mere
_variety_ of living things.’[63] The simple observer is carried
away, absorbed, ravished by the delight and the fascinating play
of this variety of living things, but how far more absorbing and
inexhaustible does the delight become when we feel that in studying
this universal play of life we are every moment probing the depths of
our own souls.




CHAPTER II

DARWIN: THE THINKER


I

Mere observation of the natural world, varied, fascinating,
inexhaustible as it is, affords only the material for science.
Observed facts must be built up, woven together, ordered, arranged,
systematized into conclusions and theories by reflection and
reason, if they are to have full bearing on life and the universe.
Knowledge is the accumulation of facts. Wisdom is the establishment
of relations. And just because the latter process is delicate and
perilous, it is all the more delightful. The lofty scorn of the true
philosopher for mere perception is well shown in Royer Collard’s
remark: ‘There is nothing so despicable as a fact.’ Which does not
prevent philosophers or any one else from making facts the essential
basis of all discussion of relations. Darwin’s own comments on the
general connection between the two are always interesting: ‘I have an
old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist,’[432]
and again: ‘About thirty years ago there was much talk that
geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well
remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go
into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. How
odd it is that any one should not see that all observation must be
for or against some view if it is to be of any service.’[433]

It is supposed to be one of the chief functions of education to
develop this faculty of relating facts to each other and to train and
strengthen the reasoning powers. Darwin did not feel that education
did much for him in this line, at any rate in the scientific
directions which were of especial interest to him. He believed that
his academic discipline was largely wasted. Making Latin verses did
not appeal. More general lines of current information attracted
him very little, and he seemed at times oddly ignorant of what the
ordinary educated man is expected to know. Thus his son records that
he once asked Hooker where ‘this place Wien is where they publish so
many books.’[434] He read vastly in all that concerned his own work,
but that very fact prevented his keeping up with daily interests that
were remote from it. His own comment on his university experience is
bitter: ‘During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time
was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as
completely as at Edinburgh and at school.’[435] And he believed that
he had learned everything that to him was worth learning pretty much
by his own efforts: ‘I consider that all I have learnt of any value
has been self-taught.’[436]

[Illustration: DOWN HOUSE FROM THE GARDEN]

With this sort of discipline behind him, it is of great interest to
examine his general attitude toward the connection of reasoning and
fact. To some of us the controversy between induction and deduction
has always seemed rather profitless. The Baconian insistence upon
the absolute necessity of fact as the basis of all solid theory is
of course indisputably just. But to talk of proceeding from abstract
theory to the investigation of fact seems as barren as to wander
aimlessly in unassorted realms of fact without the assistance of
theory. It is comforting, therefore, to find so clear and systematic
a thinker as Huxley unwilling to identify his processes with either
complete induction or deduction: ‘Those who refuse to go beyond fact
rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of
science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by
the “anticipation of nature,” that is, by the invention of hypotheses
which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start
with; and not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness,
turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.’[437]

Now Darwin obviously finds himself in precisely the uncertainty
between inductive and deductive methods that Huxley here indicates.
His instincts were naturally hostile to abstract theory, which used
facts as playthings to substantiate soaring conjecture. He says in
regard to one scientific author: ‘I am not convinced, partly I think
owing to the deductive cast of much of his reasoning; and I know not
why, but I never feel convinced by deduction, even in the case of
H. Spencer’s writings.’[438] And he speaks even more specifically
concerning Spencer himself: ‘I always feel a malicious pleasure
when _a priori_ conclusions are knocked on the head; and therefore
I felt somewhat like a devil when I read your remarks on Herbert
Spencer.’[439] Early and late he emphasized that ‘no one has a right
to speculate without distinct facts.’[440] Yet at the same time he
urges and reiterates that the mere collection of facts, without
some basis of theory for guidance and elucidation, is foolish and
profitless: ‘I am a firm believer that without speculation there is
no good and original observation.’[441]

The truth is, the importance of imaginative power in the equipment of
a great scientist is often underestimated. Exact and watchful vision
is the first necessity; but it does not go far, or not farthest,
except as it has behind it the thoughts that wander through eternity,
the vast and questing genius that is perpetually on the lookout for
causes and explanations and is eager to evolve theory from the sure
and substantial but inanimate basis of fact. Even Thoreau almost
deplores his intense preoccupation with the fascinating business of
observing: ‘Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature
directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and
beyond her. To look at her is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa.
It turns the man of science to stone. I feel that I am dissipated
by so many observations.... I have almost a slight, dry headache as
the result of all this observing.’[442] Theory, speculation, must be
perpetually checked and restrained by the precision of systematic
logic, but the accurate eye and the careful finger need to be
supplemented by the eternally active mind.

As to the activity of Darwin’s mind there can be no question
whatever. He not only saw, but he thought incessantly. If you compare
the Beagle Journal with the Journal of Thoreau, you see at once how
much more quick and ready the English naturalist is with speculation
and conjecture. The smallest fact is apt to set him off on a train
of theory, where Thoreau simply records, or possibly compares, and
passes on. How significant is the brief comment of Asa Gray, in
regard to some botanical point which as a specialist in that line he
should have been the first to develop: ‘That is real Darwin. I just
wonder you and I never thought of it. But _he_ did.’[443] And he not
only thought himself, he had the rarer and more valuable faculty of
making others think. His mind was so intense and so magnetic in its
constant activity that all those who came into contact with it were
impelled and fired to work double on speculation of their own. ‘You
stimulate my mind,’ says Gray again, ‘far more than any one else,
except, perhaps Hooker.’[444]

On this point of intellectual fertility, as on his other scientific
qualifications, it is most interesting to hear Darwin himself. The
mental activity was present early and late, and it does not appear
that the exuberance of youth especially emphasized it or that it
tended to increase with the later desire to develop and elaborate his
special theories. He himself says in the Autobiographical sketch:
‘I am not conscious of any change in my mind during the last thirty
years, excepting in one point: ... I think that I have become a
little more skillful in guessing right explanations and in devising
experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere
practice, and of a larger store of knowledge.’[445]

The quick intelligence was always working, sometimes wearily,
sometimes eagerly, but working, unless absolute physical prostration
forbade. When he is too exhausted, he complains: ‘Facts compel me to
conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking.’[446] But
if so, he certainly lived contrary to his nature. He tells us that he
cannot resist forming hypotheses on every subject.[447] Sometimes he
bewails the tendency, realizing its drawbacks and dangers. Sometimes
he gives way to it, recognizing its charm: ‘It is delightful to
have many points fermenting in one’s brain.’[448] Speculation is
fascinating. Theory gives form and texture to the fleeting drift and
confusion of fact. Yet even when one indulges with most enthusiasm,
a touch of humor shows that the satisfaction must be tempered with a
certain lack of entire confidence: ‘That is a splendid fact about the
white moths; it warms one’s very blood to see a theory thus almost
proved to be true.’[449]

For the wonder and the interest of Darwin is, that, with such an
eager and perpetual bent toward theorizing, he could keep the bent
so fully under control. As Karl Pearson puts it, generally: ‘Hundreds
of men have allowed their imagination to solve the universe, but
the men who have contributed to our real understanding of natural
phenomena have been those who were unstinted in their application
of criticism to the product of their imaginations.’[450] Surely no
man applied such criticism more carefully, more conscientiously,
more constantly than Darwin. He analyzes his own position and sees
the dangers of it: ‘Living so solitary as I do, one gets to think
in a silly manner of one’s own work.’[451] He sees constantly how
theory interferes and warps the judgment: ‘I have not a doubt that
before many months are over I shall be longing for the most dishonest
species as being more honest than the honestest theories.’[452] The
possibility of error haunts him, torments him, and he knows well how
apt his own speculative disposition is to mislead: ‘What you hint
at generally is very, very true: that my work will be grievously
hypothetical, and large parts by no means worthy of being called
induction, my commonest error being probably induction from too few
facts.’[453] As a consequence he was ever on his guard against being
led astray. The tempting little demon of hypothesis might be luring
round the corner: ‘It is as difficult not to form some opinion as
it is to form a correct judgment.’[454] But whatever opinion was
formed must be corrected, must be adjusted, must be tested, by the
cold and rigid measure of fact. As he says himself, ‘I have steadily
endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis,
however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every
subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.’[455]
And one who knew him well and had studied him carefully says the same
thing with equal emphasis: ‘His long experience had given him a kind
of instinctive insight into the method of attack of any biological
problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he rigidly controlled the
fertility of his mind in hypothetical explanations by the no less
fertility of ingeniously devised experiment.’[456]

In regard to this matter of speculative freedom and the tendency
to let imagination run wild, it is interesting to watch Darwin’s
comments on the general methods of others. The excess of abstinence
he indeed deplores, recognizing that a man’s extreme caution may
prevent him from theorizing enough: ‘How many astronomers have
labored their whole lives on observations, and have not drawn a
single conclusion.’[457] But the danger on the other side is so great
and so ruinous that it cannot be enough insisted on, and indeed at
times it makes all generalization suspicious and almost a thing
to be eschewed: ‘I look at a strong tendency to generalize as an
entire evil.’[458] At any rate, the theorist must never forget the
subjective element, that his preconceptions and prejudices are apt
to warp his judgment and distort his vision, till the keenest of
observers and the sanest of thinkers may go astray: ‘the firmest
conviction of the truth of a doctrine by its author seems, alas, not
to be the slightest guarantee of truth.’[459]

The profit and the lesson of all which must be constantly borne home
to oneself: ‘When I think of the many cases of men who have studied
one subject for years, and have persuaded themselves of the truth
of the foolishest doctrines, I feel sometimes a little frightened,
whether I may not be one of these monomaniacs.’[460]

To appreciate fully Darwin’s combination of mental activity and
fertility with moderation and restraint, it is well to place him
between two extreme types of thinkers. On the one hand, there is
the born essential reasoner, and logician, Spinoza, for instance,
or Hegel, or Darwin’s own contemporary, Spencer, the man who to
a greater or less extent takes fact for his foundation, but who
by nature and temperament delights to weave an elaborate web of
logical theory, rigid and perfect in its appearance of systematic
deduction, but too apt in the end to treat facts with indifference if
not disrespect. I like especially in this regard to compare Darwin
with Lucretius. The _De Rerum Natura_ is one of the most striking,
enthralling examples of what I should call passionate thinking.
Theoretical problems take hold of Lucretius like the ecstasies of
love. He tears and wrenches at the roots of thought, determined to
make them yield to the delving vigor of his eager search. Now Darwin
has a broad and constant curiosity, his interest may well be called
enthusiasm, and he himself uses the term passion for it: ‘Hence it
has come to be a passion with me to try to connect all such facts by
some sort of hypothesis.’[461] Yet in no phase of his nature should I
be inclined ever to employ the general word, ‘passion,’ and it seems
to me that every page of Lucretius is stamped with a devouring ardor
different from anything Darwin knew.

On the other hand, over against these furious reasoners, I should
set Darwin’s close contemporary, Sainte-Beuve, who, as I said in the
previous chapter was, in some aspects, as admirable a representative
of the scientific spirit as Darwin himself. The endless curiosity,
the unlimited observation of fact, as embodied in the human subject,
have never been more richly exemplified than in the great French
critic. But Sainte-Beuve was no reasoner in the larger sense. He
did not even avoid reasoning from mistrust: he had no taste for it,
and when he dealt with it, it was always charily and with extreme
reserve. He delighted to study and portray individuals and to allow
those individuals, as it were, to classify themselves and so to point
the way to general results.

Between these two extremes Darwin stands, as one who used reasoning
to the fullest extent for the interpretation of fact, yet at the same
time always stuck closely and rigidly to the fact itself, and would
not allow it to be for an instant distorted by the reasoning process.


II

The supreme means for keeping theory on a basis of fact is of course
unfailing, persistent, ever-varied experiment. In the preceding
chapter we have seen observation lead naturally to experiment; but
experiment is observation guided, directed, and illuminated by
theory. And assuredly no scientist ever had the love and the habit
of experiment more firmly fixed than Darwin. The explanation of
phenomena was all very well in its place, essential, absorbing, but
he would have agreed absolutely with Aristotle as to the proper
ordering of the process: ‘After this we shall pass on to the
discussion of causes. For to do this when the investigation of the
details is complete, is the proper and natural method, and that
whereby the subject and the premises of our argument will afterwards
be rendered plain.’[462] The fascination of experiment in itself
was endless and almost sufficing: ‘The love of experiment was very
strong in him,’ says his son, ‘and I can remember the way he would
say, “I shan’t be easy till I have tried it,” as if an outside force
were driving him.’[463] There was a sense of adventure about it, of
discovery, and he loved to try things that seemed almost fantastic
and absurd: ‘If you knew some of the experiments (if they may be
so-called) which I am trying, you would have a good right to sneer,
for they are so _absurd_ even in _my_ opinion that I dare not tell
you.’[464] And more concisely and vividly: ‘I am like a gambler
and love a wild experiment.’[465] The best comment on which is the
excellent remark of Professor Castle: ‘Most advances in practical
affairs are made by those who have the courage to attempt what others
_with good reason think unattainable_. When such attempts have
succeeded, the world simply revises its classification of things
attainable and unattainable, and makes a fresh start.’[466]

The first thing in regard to experiment is conditions. There are
of course rough and elementary experiments, involving only simple
principles, which do not require minute care in detail. But in many
cases the nicest and most delicate preparation and adjustment are
indispensable to ensure reliable results. The extensive equipment of
modern laboratories was not at Darwin’s command, and though he had
considerable financial resources, he could not afford the unlimited
outlay of commercial research. Thus, we read of one of Mr. Burbank’s
trials: ‘Forty thousand blackberry and raspberry hybrids were
produced and grown until the fruit matured. Then from the whole lot
a single variety was chosen as the best.... All others were uprooted
with their crop of ripening berries, heaped up into a pile twelve
feet wide, fourteen feet high, and twenty-two feet long, and burned.
Nothing remained of this expensive and lengthy experiment, except
the one parent plant of the new variety.’[467] Darwin could hardly
work on any such elaborate scale as this. Yet, as one turns over his
vast record of experiment, one is astonished to see how thorough
and painstaking was his effort to avoid accidents and to provide
for disturbing contingencies. Take, for instance, as a minor but
significant illustration, his account of the difficulty in carrying
out the specific fertilization of certain plants: ‘In making eighteen
different unions, sometimes on windy days, and pestered by bees and
flies buzzing about, some few errors could hardly be avoided. One
day I had to keep a third man by me all the time to prevent the bees
visiting the uncovered plants, for in a few seconds’ time they might
have done irreparable mischief. It was also extremely difficult to
exclude minute Diptera from the net.’[468]

Another vital consideration as to experiment, is that it should be
kept impersonal. In most cases, if one is to experiment fruitfully
and satisfactorily, there should be some special object in view, some
particular point to be rejected or confirmed. Unless you know just
what you are looking for, you are apt not to see. Again and again in
Darwin’s book on Orchids, as in many of the others, we read that he
made investigations and got no results, simply because he did not
have in mind theoretical possibilities. When he had reasoned out
what ought to happen or might happen, he often found that it did.
The danger of this method is obvious. When the experimenter is so
desperately anxious to see something, unless he is most carefully
trained and disciplined, he will see it. It is not to be supposed
that Darwin always escaped this danger, but few men have been more
prepared for it or more ready to allow for it than he. His confession
of prejudice, his recognition of the importance of certain points
in his general theory and of his unwillingness to have anything
interfere with them are among his greatest charms: ‘I remember well
the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.... The
sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes
me sick.’[469]

We have already enlarged under observation on the essential quality
of accuracy, and it may simply be added that accuracy is doubly
important in all experiments for a theoretical purpose. Accuracy,
complete, detailed, mathematical exactitude, was Darwin’s hobby, and
the minuteness of his record constantly exemplifies it.

Also, to confirm their accuracy experiments have to be repeated.
Goethe remarks with justice that it is not necessary to travel all
over the world to make sure that the sky is everywhere blue,[470] and
no doubt there are repetitions that are vain and superfluous. But
many difficult and delicate researches have to be gone over again
and again that the minutest detail may be complete; and the process
may involve months of tedious delay. Darwin’s unfailing care, both
to repeat and to avoid repetition, is well indicated in his son’s
comment: ‘Although he would patiently go on repeating experiments
where there was any good to be gained, he could not endure having to
repeat an experiment which ought, if complete care had been taken, to
have succeeded the first time.’[471] Here too, one cannot appreciate
how immense and thorough his experimentation was without looking
through such books as the ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication’ or
‘The Power of Movement in Plants.’ The endless repetition of slightly
varied combinations to test a difficult or remote conclusion makes
one feel how persistent and inexhaustible the patience was. And after
all the years of repeated and varied research and investigation he
writes the almost pathetic epilogue six months before his death: ‘I
wish that I had enough strength and spirit to commence a fresh set of
experiments, and publish the results, with a full recantation of my
errors when convinced of them.’[429]

Finally, experiments have to be not only made, but recorded, and the
accuracy, so essential with all scientific observation, is above
all essential here, since the omission of a link in the record may
be ruinous to the continuity of the logical chain. It is peculiarly
characteristic of Darwin that he wanted the record of error and
mistake as well as of success. ‘I remember,’ says his son, ‘how
strongly he urged the necessity of keeping the notes of experiments
which failed, and to this rule he always adhered.’[430] The value of
preserving and comparing apparently insignificant and meaningless
notes is sometimes brought out, as in a special case of orchids: ‘I
had given up the case as hopeless, until summing up my observations,
the explanation presently to be given, and subsequently proved by
repeated experiments to be correct, suddenly occurred to me.’[431]
Long experience of his own mistakes and failures induces extreme
scepticism as to the results of others: ‘_The difficulty is to know
what to trust_.’[352] Even when he has taken the greatest pains,
the scepticism often lingers and forces him to repeat although with
an identical result: ‘Notwithstanding the care taken and the number
of trials made, when in the following year I looked merely at the
results, without reading over my observations, I again thought that
there must have been some error, and thirty-five fresh trials were
made with the weakest solution; but the results were as plainly
marked as before.’[353] And thus the long series of packed, closely
printed volumes forms an amazing record of a life of zealous,
persistent, curious experimentation from beginning to end.


III

Now let us look a little more closely at the stuff and quality of
Darwin’s logical processes, considered as such. He himself often
complains of the slowness and difficulty of his thinking. It is hard
for him to arrange his thoughts, he says, hard for him to get them
into the lucid and effective order which carries conviction with
it, almost enforces conviction by the power of its own movement. He
says of one of his critics: ‘He admits to a certain extent Natural
Selection, yet I am sure does not understand me. It is strange that
very few do, and I am become quite convinced that I must be an
extremely bad explainer.’[354]

It is worth while to note the comments of Huxley, as one of Darwin’s
staunchest friends and supporters, on his reasoning faculty and
processes. When Romanes lauds Darwin’s colossal intellect, Huxley is
inclined to protest: ‘Colossal does not seem to me to be the right
epithet for Darwin’s intellect. He had a clear, rapid intelligence,
a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was
the strict subordination of all these to the love of truth.’[355]
Elsewhere Huxley adds: ‘Exposition was not Darwin’s forte—and his
English is sometimes wonderful. But there is a marvelous dumb
sagacity about him and he gets to truth by ways as dark as those of
the Heathen Chinee.’[356] Of ‘The Origin of Species’ Huxley writes:
‘It is one of the hardest books to understand thoroughly that I know
of.’[357] And again, more amply: ‘Long occupation with the work has
led the present writer to believe that “The Origin of Species” is
one of the hardest of books to master, and he is justified in this
conviction by observing that although the “Origin” has been close on
thirty years before the world, the strangest misconceptions of the
essential nature of the theory therein advocated are still put forth
by serious writers.’[358] Critics less friendly to Darwin than Huxley
have spoken still more strongly.

I feel that Huxley’s judgment is too severe. It is true that Darwin
had not the admirable gift of logical, lucid exposition which made
Huxley himself one of the most luminous of scientific writers. But
even when Darwin’s reasoning is most complex and difficult, there
is a notable quality of sincerity and single-mindedness, which wins
and retains your confidence. He seems somehow to have an exceptional
power of taking you into his mental processes, and to make you think
and see and feel as he does. If you feel that he may be wrong, it is
because he feels that he may be wrong himself.

It is profitable to examine a little more in detail some
illustrations of Darwin’s scientific theorizing. The great central
doctrine of evolution, with its buttressing support of natural
selection, will fill our next chapter, but there are several lesser
developments of speculation which deserve notice. I need hardly say
that we are not in any way discussing the validity of the theories in
the abstract, but simply Darwin’s fashion of framing, holding, and
sustaining them.

There is first the theory as to the formation of coral reefs. At
an early period in his career Darwin conceived the idea that these
reefs were produced by the subsidence of the ocean bed and the
steady building up of the coral insects toward the surface. He
himself admits that this theory was the most deductive of all that
he ever urged and the least founded in the beginning upon a wide
and careful investigation of fact. Alexander Agassiz, who, after
extensive research, was not disposed to accept it, wrote: ‘Darwin’s
observations were all theoretical, based upon chartographic study
in his house, a very poor way of doing, and that’s the way all his
coral reef work has been done.’[359] And the theory has met with
strenuous opposition from many quarters, though one critic says in
regard to it: ‘Be it true or not, be it a competent explanation or
not, no matter. In influence on geology it has been as far-reaching
as the doctrine of natural selection has been on biology.’[360]
But Darwin himself clung to it to the end, meeting objections with
vast ingenuity and reiterating his positions with ampler and more
penetrating arguments. Yet through all the persistence there is the
readiness at any moment to see the other side. ‘I must still adhere
to my opinion, that the atolls and barrier reefs in the middle of
the Pacific and Indian Oceans indicate subsidence, but I fully agree
with you that such cases as that of the Pellew Islands, if of at all
frequent occurrence, would make my general conclusions of very little
value. Future observers must decide between us.’[361] And he writes
frankly to Alexander Agassiz: ‘If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked
on the head and annihilated so much the better.’[362]

Another instance of Darwin’s zeal and ingenuity in reasoning is the
theory of sexual selection, devised to meet some difficulties in
his general argument. Many animals have certain so-called secondary
sexual characteristics, that is, characteristics affecting one sex
only yet not directly involved in the reproductive process. Darwin
believed that these characteristics were largely developed through
the working of natural selection upon the basis of the preference of
one sex for individuals of the other for mating purposes. That is to
say, the splendor of the male peacock’s tail made him more attractive
to the female and therefore more successful with her. There were
numerous and obvious difficulties in this view, as the assumption of
a fine æsthetic sense in comparatively lowly organized creatures,
and it was energetically disputed from the start. Wallace, Darwin’s
ardent fellow-thinker and coadjutor, was anything but favorable to
it. Yet Darwin’s faith was never really shaken. He persisted to the
end, making new experiments and investigations, and meeting his
adversaries’ contentions with vast and varied resource. In ‘The
Descent of Man’ he wrote: ‘For my own part I conclude that of all
the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance
between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the
lower animals, sexual selection has been the most efficient.’[363]
Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see him reveal the doubt and the
questioning that were inwrought with conviction in his mind. He
writes to Wallace: ‘I grieve to differ from you, and it actually
terrifies me and makes me constantly distrust myself.’[364] Again:
‘You will be pleased to hear that I am undergoing severe distress
about protection and sexual selection; this morning I oscillated
with joy towards you; this evening I have swung back to my [old]
position, out of which I fear I shall never get.’[365] And he sums up
the process with a general remark of the largest and most fruitful
bearing: ‘I sometimes marvel how truth progresses, so difficult
is it for one man to convince another, unless his mind is vacant.
Nevertheless, I myself to a certain extent contradict my own remark,
for I believe far more in the importance of protection than I did
before reading your articles.’[366]

Still another example of theorizing is the doctrine of pangenesis.
Darwin’s general theory of evolution which dealt so much with
heredity, was closely complicated with the difficulty of
understanding how one minute reproductive cell could transmit by
inheritance all the complicated variety of organs and functions in a
highly developed plant or animal. To meet this difficulty he devised
the explanation of pangenesis (he doubts about the name, because ‘my
wife says it sounds wicked, like pantheism’),[367] that is, the idea
that the primitive cell contains a great number of _gemmules_, each
transmitting and originating some particular organ with its varied
functions. Here again the theory, as Darwin conceived it, did not
find general acceptance, though in some respects it surprisingly
anticipates the results of the latest modern research. But the
interesting thing is to see the ardor with which its inventor worked
it out and the elaborate argument with which he carries it through
the latter part of the great work on ‘Animals and Plants under
Domestication.’ It is difficult, he admits. He does not blame any
one for disputing it, or for rejecting it, or even for laughing at
it. ‘The hypothesis of Pangenesis, as applied to the several great
classes of facts just discussed, no doubt is extremely complex, but
so are the facts.’[368] And then he lets his imagination range
more widely than usual in contemplating possible deductions and
consequences: ‘No other attempt, as far as I am aware, has been
made, imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one point
of view these several grand classes of facts. An organic being is a
microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating
organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in
heaven.’[369] Yet here again he introduces the inevitable reservation
and in his Autobiographical Sketch he says: ‘Towards the end of the
work I give my well-abused hypothesis of Pangenesis. An unverified
hypothesis is of little or no value; but if any one should hereafter
be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be
established, I shall have done good service.’[370]

It seems sometimes surprising that, with this marked bent towards
abstract speculation, which it was so difficult to control, Darwin
should have been always so indifferent to philosophical thought
on the ultimate questions of the universe. He admits that he knew
little of metaphysics and cared little for them. But this again is
instructive as to the peculiar balance of his temperament. He liked
to speculate, but he would not speculate for a moment without a
firm foundation of fact. His feet must be based first on the solid
tangible earth. Then if his head would not reach the clouds, he would
keep out of them.


IV

It will be profitable to consider more in detail some specific
elements of Darwin’s reasoning. In the first place, we have seen
everywhere and in all connections that his propensity to eager
theorizing was tempered with an unfailing sense of doubt and
mistrust. He was indeed always disposed to act in the spirit of
Weisman’s remark: ‘When we are confronted with facts which we see
no possibility of understanding save on a single hypothesis, even
though it be an undemonstratable one, we are naturally led to accept
the hypothesis, at least until a better one can be found.’[371]
And he recognized fully the force of the comment which Huxley
makes on a phrase of Goethe, to the effect that doubt must not be
blighting or destructive, but fruitful and stimulating: ‘Goethe has
an excellent aphorism defining that state of mind which he calls
“_Thätige Skepsis_”—active doubt. It is doubt which so loves truth
that it neither dares rest in doubting nor extinguish itself by
unjustified belief.’[64] At the same time, the doubt was there,
was temperamental, and could not be altogether extinguished, even
when the rush of the logical impetus was fullest. One beautiful
expression of it among many is, ‘When you say you cannot master the
train of thoughts, I know well enough that they are too doubtful and
obscure to be mastered. I have often experienced what you call the
humiliating feeling of getting more and more involved in doubt the
more one thinks of the facts and reasoning on doubtful points.’[65]
The truth is, that Darwin had in a high degree the quality, often
so hampering to the man of practical action, but invaluable to the
thinker, of getting outside of himself and his own point of view and
criticizing it as if it were the standpoint of some one else. He
himself indicates this forcibly in connection with returning to one’s
ideas after an interval: ‘The delay in this case, as with all my
other books, has been a great advantage to me; for a man after a long
interval can criticize his own work, almost as well as if it were
that of another person.’[66] Some men can.

Another characteristic of Darwin’s mental processes is his way
of meeting difficulties. The born reasoner is apt to slur over
obstacles and objections, to devote himself with endless ingenuity
to eliminating them rather than facing them squarely. Darwin was
ingenious enough, but he did not dodge difficulties. Instead of doing
so, his propensity was, if anything, to make them and seek them. It
was said of Pasteur, so like Darwin in many points: ‘No adversary
of M. Pasteur had formulated this argument; but M. Pasteur, who
had within himself an ever-present adversary, always on the watch
and determined to yield only to the force of accumulated evidence,
himself raised the objection.’[67] So Darwin. As he himself records,
and no thinker ever laid down a more significant principle or one
more revealing for his own mental constitution: ‘I had, also, during
many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published
fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed
to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and
at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts
were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.’[68]
And the intense consciousness of objections and difficulties appears
even more vividly in the sentence: ‘I cannot too strongly express my
conviction of the general truth of my doctrines, and God knows I have
never shirked a difficulty.’[69]

The recognition of obstacles and complications constantly popping
up from everywhere naturally necessitated endless revision and
recasting. Here again, the habitual reasoner, having once set his
mould is reluctant to alter it. Not so Darwin. There are indeed
times when even he rebels and declares that it will be more fruitful
to follow new paths than to be perpetually adjusting the old. But
in general his readiness to alter and reconstruct is unlimited.
He revises and works over his books. In doing so he showed his
characteristic disposition to accept and defer to the judgment of
others. How charming is his daughter’s account of this: ‘He was
always so ready to be convinced that any suggested alteration was an
improvement, and so full of gratitude for the trouble taken. I do
not think that he ever used to forget to tell me what improvement
he thought that I had made, and he used almost to excuse himself if
he did not agree with any correction. I think I felt the singular
modesty and graciousness of his nature through thus working for
him in a way I never should otherwise have done.’[70] There is no
better way to appreciate the extent and the persistence of Darwin’s
revision than to make even a cursory comparison of the first and the
last editions of the ‘Origin.’ Almost every page shows minor or
considerable changes, and while some are no doubt mere matters of
language, many have a bearing, however slight, on the trend of the
reasoning, deepening, or strengthening, or clarifying it.

It is profitable also to watch Darwin’s attitude towards argument,
the direct interchange of view by those who take different sides
of a case and are at once eager to advance their own and to detect
the flaws in their opponent’s. It is very evident that he was not a
quick and natural arguer, as was Huxley, for instance. His son says:
‘He used to say of himself that he was not quick enough to hold an
argument with any one, and I think this was true. Unless it was a
subject on which he was just then at work, he could not get the
train of argument into working order quickly enough.’[71] And Darwin
confesses the same thing with his unfailing, charming naïveté, in a
letter to Hooker: ‘I am astonished at your success and audacity. It
is something unintelligible to me how any one can argue in public
like orators do. I had no idea you had this power.’[72]

Arguments haunted him, agitated him, disturbed him. Active discussion
was apt to be followed by a broken night, filled with the things that
might and should have been said and were not. Even of a conversation
quite remote from his scientific interest he says: ‘Your slave
discussion disturbed me much; but as you would care no more for my
opinion on this head than for the ashes of this letter, I will say
nothing except that it gave me some sleepless, most uncomfortable
hours.’[73]

The gift I have before suggested, of getting outside of your own
position and judging it as another would, while it benefits the
results of argument, is most hampering in the process, since one
finds oneself stating one’s adversary’s case sometimes more forcibly
than he does himself. Darwin often repeats the principle I have
quoted earlier, of recognizing and recording objections, and he sums
up his method in regard to his main theory: ‘I have for some time
determined to give the arguments on _both_ sides (as far as I could)
instead of arguing on the mutability side alone.’[74]

Yet in spite of all the strain and effort of argument, he liked it
and believed in it. In the concluding chapter of the ‘Origin’ he
says: ‘This whole volume is one long argument.’[75] It certainly is.
Elsewhere he says of a personal conversation: ‘I was particularly
glad of our discussion after dinner; fighting a battle with you
always clears my mind wonderfully.’[76] To get the mind clear, to
illuminate and elucidate the complicated tangles of thought and
theory, that was always the object, and if verbal battles helped it
on, they were welcome.

But if he liked sincere, earnest argument, he detested controversy,
the bitter war of excited personal feelings bent rather on achieving
an individual triumph than on proving an abstract theory. He
condemned and deplored the injury to science inevitably wrought by
such disputes and had nothing but disgust for the manifestations of
temper that were bound to accompany them: ‘I went the other evening
to the Zoölogical Society, where the speakers were snarling at each
other in a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.’[77]

When his own views were involved in bitterness, as, alas, they too
often were, he expressed the keenest regret: ‘I often think that my
friends ... have good cause to hate me, for having stirred up so much
mud, and led them into so much odious trouble. If I had been a friend
of myself, I should have hated me.’[78] He early made up his mind to
keep out of quarrels if possible, and he congratulated himself on the
whole on his success: ‘I rejoice that I have avoided controversies,
and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my
geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a
controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of
time and temper.’[79]

Thus, whenever it was possible, he shunned dispute, and if, by any
chance, haste and eagerness involved him in a mistaken cause, he
bitterly regretted his blunder and was ready to acknowledge it with
the utmost frankness. One of the most striking cases of this is that
of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, as to which Darwin had developed a
geological theory which he asserted with a good deal of conviction.
A careful consideration of his opponent’s arguments, obliged him to
recognize that he was completely in the wrong, and he gave up, though
with a pang: ‘I am very poorly to-day, and very stupid, and hate
everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders.’[80] His
acknowledgment of his error was ample and complete.

It was his natural frankness in admitting his mistakes and
endeavoring to rectify them which made Darwin so attractive and
engaging. Goethe complains of the disposition of many people to
reiterate a misstatement because they have once made it.[81] Such
reiteration did not appeal to Darwin in the least. Sometimes he was
irritated and annoyed by the attitude of his adversaries, and he
expressed the annoyance with the same outspokenness that he gave to
other things; but there was never any attempt to conceal his blunders
or to maintain his own positions simply because they were his.

Indeed, in this regard, as in all others, what distinguished him was
a singular and charming candor. It is this which makes his letters
so attractive and so revealing. They are not great literary letters.
They are always written in haphazard fashion and with the utmost
casual directness. But few correspondences of literary men or of any
others reveal the man with such clear and winning amplitude. He opens
his heart and leads you right into it without the least pretence of
self-revelation, but simply as if he were thinking aloud to you, as
he is. Take, for instance, among a bewildering mass of illustrations,
his confession of the sense of inferiority in regard to Spencer: ‘I
feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear, rather enjoy feeling
that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel
that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art
of wriggling, I feel aggrieved.’[82] Or this other acknowledgment
to Hooker: ‘How candidly and meekly you took my Jeremiad on your
severity to second-class men. After I had sent it off, an ugly little
voice asked me, once or twice, how much of my noble defence of the
poor in spirit and in fact, was owing to your having not seldom
smashed favorite notions of my own. I silenced the ugly little voice
with contempt, but it would whisper again and again.’[83] The sense,
the atmosphere, of a pervading candor, was what Huxley expressed so
excellently when he spoke of Darwin’s having ‘a certain intense and
almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were
irradiated, as by a central fire. It was this greatest and rarest of
endowments which kept his vivid imagination and great speculative
powers within due bounds ... which made him accept criticisms and
suggestions from anybody and everybody, not only without impatience,
but with expressions of gratitude sometimes almost comically in
excess of their value.’[84]

For the honesty and the candor not only led him to admit his own
mistakes, but made him singularly ready to recognize the merits of
others, and to tolerate not only their views but even their dogmatic
assertion of them. He made mistakes all the time, and yet he knew
that he was sincere and lofty in purpose. Why should not others be
the same? Why should not their theories be right and his wrong? ‘It
matters very little to any one except myself, whether I am a little
more or less wrong on this or that point; in fact, I am sure to be
proved wrong on many points.’[85] Of one who did not agree with him
he could say: ‘I know nothing of him excepting from his letters:
these show remarkable talent, astonishing perseverance, much modesty,
and what I admire, determined difference from me on many points.’[86]
And how winning is his defense of blunderers, of those who do poor
work which is not all poor: ‘Shall you think me very impudent if I
tell you that I have sometimes thought that ... you are a little
too hard on bad observers; that a remark made by a bad observer
_cannot_ be right; an observer who deserves to be damned you would
utterly damn. I feel entire deference to any remark you make out of
your own head; but when in opposition to some poor devil, I somehow
involuntarily feel not quite so much.’[87]

The truth is, that Darwin’s tolerance was based, as all real
tolerance is apt to be, on the vast and haunting sense of his own
ignorance. Again and again he repeats and emphasizes how little
he knows, how little any one knows, and how petty, imperfect, and
inadequate are the efforts of any and all of us to penetrate the
veil of shrouding mystery which involves the deepest secrets of
life. To probe this mystery the vague and flickering torch of reason
is all that is given to us. And those who are most conversant with
reason and make most use of it mistrust it most. When the far surer
guidance of instinct fails us, reason is our only support, and we
must employ it not only for the larger speculative purposes, but for
the practical decisions. At its best, it is a bright and splendid
instrument, incredibly keen and penetrating, and able to accomplish
miracles in the hands of those who manipulate it skillfully. But it
is an instrument as delicate as it is bright, and it loses point
and edge, unless constant pains are taken to keep it in working
condition. Also, it cuts both ways, and every way, and to even the
expert manipulator, perhaps to him most of all, it is apt to be
difficult, dangerous, treacherous.

There is the subtle, unfathomable connection of reason with our
wishes, desires, and prejudices. A clever Frenchman said that reason
was given us to enable us to justify the gratification of our
passions, and when we see how the devices of logic may be used to
work from any premises to any conclusion, one feels the force of the
Frenchman’s view.

No one was more aware than Darwin of these dangers and difficulties
of reason, or of the endless possibilities of deception when one
gives oneself up to that enchanting and deluding siren. He often
emphasizes his distress and almost despair at finding himself making
deductions quite different from those which others draw from the
same facts. ‘It is really disgusting and humiliating to see directly
opposite conclusions drawn from the same facts.’[88] And again:
‘Nothing is so vexatious to me, as so constantly finding myself
drawing different conclusions from better judges than myself, from
the same facts.’[89] And yet again: ‘I hate beyond all things finding
myself in disagreement with any capable judge, when the premises are
the same.’[90]

These comments make us see clearly what Darwin’s relation to reason
was. Few thinkers have been so ready, so fertile, so abundant,
so ingenious, yet at the same time so sober, so restrained and
controlled.

With this analysis of his observation and his thought we are ready
to take up the supreme interest of Darwin’s life, the dramatic study
of the conception, elaboration, promulgation, and triumph of his
evolutionary theory.




CHAPTER III

DARWIN: THE DISCOVERER


I

The word ‘evolution’ is so popularly accepted and so generally
employed in connection with Darwin’s theories that it will never
be displaced; but it is not wholly satisfactory, because it always
suggests progress from a lower to a higher and hence involves a
difficult and invidious definition of terms. Some such phrase as
‘descent with modification’ would probably be more exact. But
whatever the term used, to associate it as a scientific theory or
discovery exclusively with Darwin or any other one man would be
absurd. The natural hypothesis of earlier thinkers was that divine
creative power, in whatever shape, had established the different
forms of life on the earth pretty much as they exist to-day. But
those who looked more deeply, were inclined to surmise, in view of
the close and evident bonds of kinship between all living things,
that variety had developed from comparative unity and that the
vital impulse, having first appeared in elementary forms, became
gradually elaborated into more and more complicated organisms. The
vast pains that Darwin took to substantiate this view, together
with his particular explanation of how the process came about, have
forever bound up the idea of evolution with his name, but he did not
originate it nor did he claim to have done so.

The various hints and manifestations of earlier evolutionary theory
are admirably elucidated in Professor Osborn’s ‘From the Greeks to
Darwin.’ The vast curiosity and reflection of Aristotle anticipated
here, as everywhere, and some of his sentences have a striking
evolutionary bearing: ‘Variety in animal life may be produced by
variety of locality.’[389] ‘Locality will differentiate habits also;
for instance, rugged highlands will not produce the same results as
the soft lowlands.’[390] And Empedocles suggests Darwin’s views even
more directly. Under the régime of Biblical and Christian tradition
evolutionary thought naturally made little progress. But with the
greater freedom of the eighteenth century, notions of modification
by descent again appeared. In England Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus,
the botanical poet, speculated curiously on the subject, and there
were various other intimations, notably in Chambers’s ‘Vestiges of
Creation,’ while Darwin himself felt that he was much influenced
by the geological theories of Lyell. In Germany Goethe became
profoundly interested in the metamorphoses of life. Especially in
France Buffon and St.-Hilaire led up to the ‘Philosophie Zoologique’
of Lamarck, which propounded the theory of modification in a very
definite form, and suggested the mode in which the modification was
accomplished. Lamarck’s idea was that plants and animals, by an
inborn, vital impulse, adapted themselves to their environment, and
that these adaptations were transmitted by inheritance. Thus wading
birds acquired webbed feet and the neck of the giraffe was elongated
in its effort to obtain its food from the branches of the trees. The
great stumbling-block of this theory has always been the difficulty
of proving that acquired adaptations are inherited.[A]

[A] Investigators have of course worked constantly and persistently
upon this point and I find Professor William McDougall quoted in a
Boston _Herald_ editorial of August 16, 1926, as saying: ‘Species may
change and undergo evolution through the efforts of the individual
parents to adapt themselves to conditions.’

What is of interest to us, however, is Darwin’s attitude toward his
more immediate predecessors, Buffon, Lamarck, Chambers, etc. This
attitude has been a matter of much comment by Samuel Butler and
others and it is not perfectly easy to understand. That Darwin in his
earlier thinking as well as in his later was influenced by previous
investigators is evident enough, for instance in touches like that
in the ‘Voyage of the Beagle’: ‘Nature by making habit omnipotent,
and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate
and productions of his miserable country.’[391] Also, his frequent
comments show that he knew what had been written before him and had
profited by it, and in the later editions of the ‘Origin’ he took
some pains to acknowledge the obligation. Yet his tone in his letters
is by no means respectful and of Lamarck especially, who had done the
most, it is difficult for him to speak without a sneer. Thus, in 1844
he writes: ‘Heaven forefend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency
to progression,” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals,”
etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from
his; though the means of change are wholly so.’[392] Again, a little
later: ‘With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any
systematical ones, except Lamarck’s which is veritable rubbish.’[393]
And later still, in 1859, he writes to Lyell: ‘You often allude
to Lamarck’s work; I do not know what you think about it, but it
appeared to me extremely poor; I got not a fact or idea from it.’[394]

Various explanations of Darwin’s treatment of Lamarck have
been offered. One at least, that of a disposition to run down a
predecessor from jealousy, we may exclude as absolutely as is
possible with poor human nature. Everything we know of Darwin in
other connections justifies us in doing this. Professor Osborn,
after referring to ‘the disdainful allusions to him [Lamarck] by
Charles Darwin (the only writer of whom Darwin ever spoke in this
tone)’[395] observes that ‘it is very evident from all Darwin’s
criticisms of Lamarck, that he had never studied him carefully in
the original.’[396] But against this view we have to set Darwin’s
own comment (italics mine): ‘What I consider, after _two deliberate
readings_, as a wretched book, and one from which (I well remember
my surprise) I gained nothing.’[397] It is true that Darwin, as
in the quotation above as to ‘adaptations from the slow willing
of animals,’ apparently misinterpreted Lamarck’s view of the
self-adaptation of the individual to its environment into the absurd
assumption that animals and even plants deliberately willed their own
evolutionary progress; but on the other hand Darwin all his life and
especially in his later period wavered toward Lamarck’s adaptation
theories. It has been suggested that in Darwin’s university years
French thought and French scientists were distinctly in disfavor
and that Darwin imbibed an enduring dislike of them.[398] Darwin
himself hints that he may have been influenced by a prejudice in
favor of his grandfather as Lamarck’s predecessor. But it seems
more probable that he disliked Lamarck because he regarded him
as a theorist and speculator who did not found his argument on a
sufficiently broad basis of fact, whereas Darwin toiled for years
at observation and experiment before he gave his theory to the
world at all. This explanation is indicated in Darwin’s remark to
Lyell: ‘As for Lamarck, as you have such a man as Grove with you,
you are triumphant; not that I can alter my opinion that to me it
was an absolutely useless book. Perhaps this was owing to my always
searching books for facts.’[399] In any case one cannot help wishing
that Darwin had spoken of a man so prominent and so highly esteemed
as Lamarck a little differently.


II

Darwin first began to be interested in the idea of modification by
descent during his voyage on the Beagle and in the year 1837.[400]
In his earlier years he had been satisfied with the conventionally
orthodox theological and scientific conception of the creation of
distinct species, and all his youthful work had been on the basis of
this view. Such phrases as the note, written in 1834, in Valparaiso:
‘It seems not a very improbable conjecture that the want of animals
may be owing to none having been created since this country was
raised from the sea,’[401] are obviously significant of the earlier
attitude. But as he observed more widely and became more and more
impressed with the infinite diversity of forms and the delicacy of
shading with which they pass into each other, the conviction grew
that the possibilities of development were unlimited, and that
individual differences might pass into varieties and these again
into species, making the origin of varied life far simpler and more
unified than had ever been imagined. And such an evolutionary process
seemed much more in accord with general natural laws than the abrupt
appearance of fixed, highly organized forms in sudden sufficiency. As
he says, ‘the subject haunted me,’ and from a very early period he
began making notes and memoranda of all observations that might bear
for—or against—the gradual modification of species.

[Illustration: A PAGE FROM A NOTEBOOK OF 1837]

The difficulty was to imagine just how the process of modification
was brought about, and until he could get some light on this point,
his enthusiasm for the general idea was chilled and baffled. As
we have seen, Lamarck’s view, that living beings directly adapted
themselves to their surroundings and then transmitted these
adaptations to their descendants, seemed at least inadequate, and
Darwin felt that the theory must have some more solid basis, if
it was to prevail at all. He set his mind to work for months and
months, and he applied the intellectual method which he himself has
so admirably defined in a letter to his young son: ‘I have been
speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered
things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very
clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything.
As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching
for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.’[402]

Searching for the cause and meaning of everything which occurred, he
at last achieved the discovery he was looking for, and so knew what
is assuredly one of the greatest of spiritual delights. Largely by
watching and studying the results of deliberate human selection with
plants and animals, he was led to his great principle of natural
selection, that is, assuming the tendency in all living beings to
vary individually, that in the intense struggle for existence
those variations which are beneficial and help the organism to
live and prosper will be preserved and transmitted. The causes
of variation, whether spontaneous or to be found in environment,
Darwin never pretended entirely to explain. Of the principle of
natural selection, or as Spencer phrased it in a form which Darwin
admitted to be in some respects more satisfactory, ‘the survival of
the fittest,’ perhaps its discoverer has given no better statement
than the sentences in the second volume of the great work on ‘Plants
and Animals under Domestication’: ‘To consider the subject under
this point of view is enough to strike one dumb with amazement.
But our amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings
almost infinite in number, during an almost infinite lapse of time,
have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree
plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was
in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life
has been preserved, whilst each which was in any way injurious has
been rigorously destroyed. And the long-continued accumulation of
beneficial variations will infallibly have led to structures as
diversified, as beautifully adapted for various purposes, and as
excellently coördinated, as we see in the animals around us. Hence
I have spoken of selection as the paramount power, whether applied
by man to the formation of domestic breeds, or by nature to the
production of species.’[403]

It is not to be supposed that the first grasp of evolution through
variation and natural selection could have carried with it the full
foresight of the enormous changes, mental, moral, and spiritual,
that such a theory was likely to produce. Still, a mind so keen
and active as Darwin’s was bound to catch some suggestion of those
changes. For instance, the astonishing and deadly ease with which the
old workings of Providential adaptation and design slipped under the
new light into mere operations of mechanical law could not fail to
foreshadow the philosophical and theological upheaval that was sure
to follow. A spirit trained in the conventional atmosphere of the
early English nineteenth century must necessarily have regarded such
an upheaval with a certain amount of question, awe, and even dismay;
and Darwin indisputably had something of these feelings mingled with
the triumphant joy of discovery.

It is profoundly characteristic of the man that he did not hasten to
fling the discovery to the world, to get the immediate excitement
and glory, leaving discussion and substantiation to come afterwards.
He was so hesitant, so doubtful of his own methods and his own
powers, that he delayed even to commit his conjectures to writing in
his note-books, lest they should become hardened and distorted by the
prejudice of statement and so misleading. His one idea was to get
confirmation, by every line of study and experiment, and for twenty
years he toiled with deliberate patience before he was willing to
make the attempt to put his results into publishable shape.

And all the time there was the chance, perfectly present to his mind,
that death might prevent him from ever making the discovery known.
And all the time there was the chance that in the world of scientific
thought that was seething about him some one else might anticipate
him and propagate the idea, perhaps in a form less convincing and
less substantial than he would be able to give it. Just as he was
getting to the stage of preparation which he had aimed at, exactly
this thing seemed likely to happen. In June 1858, Alfred Russel
Wallace, a scientist of standing and ability, with whom Darwin had
corresponded, sent him a paper largely anticipating Darwin’s ideas on
natural selection, so largely that Darwin wrote of it to Lyell: ‘I
never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch
written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract;
... so all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be
smashed.’[404] And he even doubted whether he should make his views
public at all, for fear of depriving Wallace of credit: ‘I would
far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should
think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’[405] The difficulty
was adjusted, however, by friends, and a joint paper by Darwin and
Wallace both, was read at the meeting of the Linnæan Society on July
1, 1858, giving the world the first inkling of what natural selection
was to mean. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote prophetically of this meeting:
‘The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and
too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armoring.
After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath.’[406]

The relation between Darwin and Wallace in regard to priority of
discovery is one of the finest things in the whole history of
science. There was no jealousy, no bitterness, no acrimony, but
instead a full recognition of each others’ achievements, and a
sympathetic understanding which ripened into a helpful and unbroken
friendship. Wallace’s statement of the matter long after Darwin’s
death, is as noble in its unselfishness as words can make it: ‘But
what is often forgotten by the press and the public is that the idea
occurred to Darwin in 1838 ... nearly twenty years earlier than to
myself, and that during the whole twenty years he had been laboring
collecting evidence from the vast mass of literature of biology, of
horticulture, and of agriculture.... Such being the facts of the
case, I should have had no cause for complaint if the respective
shares of Darwin and myself ... had been henceforth estimated as
being roughly proportioned to the time we had each bestowed upon
it ... that is to say, as twenty years to one week.’[407] Darwin’s
summary, more general, is equally worthy of both: ‘I hope it is a
satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life have
been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy
towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe that I can
say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely sure that it is
true of you.’[408]

The first promulgation of the Darwinian ideas, with those of Wallace,
was therefore made in July, 1858. In the following year, November,
1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ was published. Darwin himself regarded
this book as a mere preliminary sketch, requiring to be supported
and buttressed by confirmatory evidence of all sorts. But it at
once overwhelmed the world, and has always been looked upon since
as the cardinal statement of the theory. As Huxley said of it, ‘It
is doubtful if any single book, except the “Principia,” ever worked
so great and so rapid a revolution in science, or made so deep an
impression on the general mind.’[409] And innumerable quotations
could be drawn from other sources to the same effect.


III

The study of the complication of motives that prompts a man like
Darwin, and many others, to reveal and establish a great scientific
discovery in spite of violent opposition is profoundly curious and
profitable. It seems to me that a main element in these motives,
with the scientist, as with the artist and the politician and the
actor and the preacher and the athlete alike, is ambition. As Darwin
himself expresses it: ‘The action of unconscious selection, as far
as pigeons are concerned, depends on a universal principle in human
nature, namely on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbors.
We see this in every fleeting fashion, even in our dress.’[410]
And again: ‘Man is the rival of other men; he delights in
competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into
selfishness.’[411] The concrete essence of ambition is the desire
for fame, to have one’s efforts, one’s powers, one’s achievement,
one’s ego, recognized, appraised, established by the applause and
commendation of one’s fellow-men. And surely this desire in itself
is a natural and even a laudable one, leading, as it does, to most
useful and enduring accomplishment. The drawback is that the thirst
for glory is so enticing, so overmastering, that it seduces men into
strange and dubious methods of obtaining it. Glory, or notoriety,
is got so often by base means, the trickster and the charlatan can
so often snatch its rewards and laurels from honest labor and even
from genius divinely endowed, that sincere and earnest spirits are
impelled to disclaim the pursuit altogether, and to insist, perhaps
with genuine self-deception, that fame as a motive hardly enters
into their struggle at all. This contention is maintained the more
easily, since it is evident that other motives, and those most
powerful, do enter in. There is the restless, ever active disposition
of human nature to be doing something, almost no matter what. To
work, to create, to achieve, is to live. Nothing else can properly
be called life. To have done great things, to be doing them, makes
you feel that you exist, and why should you vex yourself with what
other men think of them? Then for the scientist there is the sheer
delight of adding one grain of truth to the slow accumulation of the
centuries, as for the artist there is the splendid sense of having
created something beautiful. You know it, you feel it: what do the
others matter? And there is further the rich reward of believing, or
hoping, that you are doing even a little to help or to enlighten your
fellow-men, whether they are ever aware of it or not. Few things are
more soothing or cheering to the soul than that. So that there have
been thinkers and there have been artists who have said, and perhaps
sincerely thought: ‘I care not if some other man gets the credit of
my work altogether. So the work is done, and I have done it, and know
that I have done it, and it endures, and is worthy to endure, what
does the name or the glory of it matter?’ There are many who have
said this, there may be some who have meant it; but surely there are
few who have tried to do great things, and have not longed for the
human recognition of them; and why should they not?

It is peculiarly interesting to trace the play of these motives in
Darwin, because here, as everywhere, he has such an extraordinary,
intimate frankness of revelation. The love of fame was strong in
him, and he knew it. He tells us of his childhood: ‘Some other
recollections are those of vanity—namely, thinking that people
were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance and another for
boldness in climbing a low tree, and what is odder, a consciousness,
as if instinctive, that I was vain, and contempt of myself.’[412] Of
his earlier scientific years he writes: ‘I was also ambitious to take
a fair place among scientific men ... whether more ambitious or less
so than most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion.’[413] At
a much later period he still recognizes the same stimulus: ‘Without
you have a very much greater soul than I have (and I believe that
you have), you will find the medal a pleasant little stimulus; when
work goes badly, and one ruminates that all is vanity, it is pleasant
to have some tangible proof, that others have thought something of
one’s labors.’[414] And how charming is the frank admission that
he hates to have glory snatched away from him: ‘I always thought
it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I
had a grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken
and punished.’[415] Certainly in him the tranquil appreciation that
there was a something of inborn power can hardly be set down to
the inferiority complex, and inborn power does yearn for outward
applause: ‘Looking back, I infer that there must have been something
in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the
above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical
position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.’[416]

Yet with the passage of years and the growing sense of the futility
and injustice of popular reputation, Darwin was more and more
disposed to disclaim all interest in it. The desire for glory, he
admits, is a universal human motive, and a natural one; but there
are others of as much, if not more account: ‘You do me injustice
when you think that I work for fame; I value it to a certain extent;
but, if I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make
out truth.’[417] To the very end it is clear that the sale of his
books and the public discussion of his ideas are pleasant to him,
perhaps more pleasant than he recognizes. But assuredly no man can
be said to be unduly hungry for the laudation of the mob who waits
patiently for twenty years before making public his claims to it.
And it is certain that never under any circumstances would Darwin
have descended to court it by base means or false pretences. As he
himself sums up the whole matter, speaking of his youth: ‘All this
shows how ambitious I was; but I think I can say with truth that in
after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation
of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care
much about the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable
review or a large sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the
pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am sure that I have never turned
one inch out of my course to gain fame.’[418] We certainly have here
no extreme or morbid case of notoriety-seeking.


IV

Thus, in 1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ startled the world with
the theory of evolution through natural selection, a theory
which immediately raised a storm that in some of its aspects is
still raging. It is occasionally urged that Darwin’s reputation
and success had an element of good fortune in them, that, as
with so many discoveries, he simply happened to express and as
it were crystallize general ideas that were vaguely present to
many and needed only a vigorous expositor to give them universal
acceptance. Doubtless there is a measure of truth in this view.
Yet it must not be forgotten how much Darwin’s character, his tact
and reasonableness, his persistent energetic logic, above all the
enormous industry and fidelity of his research entered into his final
triumph. His own comment on this matter of the timeliness of his
theories is exceedingly interesting: ‘It has sometimes been said that
the success of the “Origin” proved “that the subject was in the air,”
or “that men’s minds were prepared for it.” I do not think that this
is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists,
and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt
about the permanence of species.... I tried once or twice to explain
to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed.
What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed
facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their
proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was
sufficiently explained.’[419]

In any case, the evolutionary theory, when first propagated, was
bitterly attacked, both by scientists and by others. Darwin’s
personal friends, and some of the younger men, who were less
hardened in conservatism, supported him, though with more or less
hesitation and reserve. But scientists of the older school, trained
in established traditions, were generally most unfavorable. Some of
them brought up the innumerable difficulties of which Darwin himself
was only too well aware. Others resorted to the usual weapons of
abuse and sarcasm. Owen in England and Agassiz in America represented
perhaps the strongest conservative views. To them the Darwinian
system was merely a passing heresy, which could not stand for a
moment against the array of facts and arguments which they could
bring from their vast experience and observation of the natural world.

The hostility of religious circles, aroused by the ‘Origin’ and
increased by the later books, especially ‘The Descent of Man,’
was fiercer and less discriminating than that of the scientists.
Perhaps the acme of it was reached in the savage interchange in
which the Bishop of Oxford asked Huxley whether he ‘was related
by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape’ and Huxley
retorted that a man had no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for
a grandfather, but if he were to feel shame, it would be for an
ancestor ‘who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere
of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric,
and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at
issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious
prejudice.’[420]

This sort of thing was by no means agreeable to Darwin, and he
repeatedly refers to the pain and distress it caused him. For
example: ‘I have just read the “Edinburgh,” which without doubt is
by ——. It is extremely malignant, clever, and I fear will be very
damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley’s lecture, and very
bitter against Hooker. So we three _enjoyed_ it together. Not that I
really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I
have got quite over it to-day. It requires much study to appreciate
all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did
not discover all myself.... It is painful to be hated in the intense
degree with which —— hates me.’[421]

What interests us is the attitude of Darwin in all the aspects of
the struggle, and we find everywhere manifested and illustrated the
mental and spiritual qualities which we have analyzed generally in
the preceding chapters. Long and cruel as the controversy was, that
large, tranquil disposition could not be warped or embittered, or
substantially shaken in its kindly serenity.

And first there is the candor, the readiness to admit mistakes and
errors, and to recognize the force and significance of an opponent’s
view and arguments. Darwin himself complains humorously of a weakness
in this regard: ‘My God, is not the case difficult enough, without
its being, as I must think, falsely made more difficult? I believe
it is my own fault—, my d——d candor.’[422] But, damned or not, it
is a quality worth admiration. As Professor Osborn excellently
puts it: ‘If he were living, ... he would be in the front line of
inquiry, armed with matchless assemblage of fact, with experiment
verification, and not least with incomparable candor and good-will.
This bequest of a noble method is hardly less precious than the
immortal content of “The Origin of Species” itself.’[423]

This is the language of an admirer. But it is curious to see how with
critics and opponents

‘To some kind of men Their graces serve them but as enemies.’

Thus, even Alexander Agassiz, who was much more favorably disposed
to evolution and to Darwin than was his father, remarks on this
point of candor: ‘I was somewhat surprised in Darwin’s Life to see
the element of wishing his cause to succeed as a cause brought out
so prominently. The one thing always claimed by Darwin’s friends
had been his absolute impartiality to his own case. Certainly
his correspondence with Hooker, Huxley, and Gray shows no such
thing.’[424] And others, distinctly more hostile, are much more
severe, declaring that Darwin’s passionate eagerness to prove his
point was quite incompatible with any real fairness or breadth. But
surely there is misunderstanding here. Any one can be impartial who
is perfectly indifferent, and when you care not which side triumphs,
there is no merit in seeing the justice of both. The charm and the
interest of Darwin are precisely that he was devoted to his own
theory, that it was the effort of his life to prove it, and yet that
at the same time he could and did look for all the facts against it
and even go to excess in allowing weight to the objections that could
be opposed to him.

And as the candor was all the more notable because of the enthusiasm,
so it was notable because it did not spring from a cold temperament,
or an incapacity for natural human anger and indignation. Darwin
enlarges, perhaps unduly, on his heat of temper in youth; and in age,
though his control and his patience got the better of this, still
the sparks would fly when unjust and unreasonable attack annoyed and
irritated him. Thus, he cries out in regard to Owen: ‘You would laugh
if you could see how indignant all Owen’s mean conduct about _E.
Columbi_ made me. I did not get to sleep till past 3 o’clock.’[425]
And again, ‘If Owen wrote the article “Oken” and the French work on
the Archetype ..., he never did a baser act.... You are so good a
Christian that you will hardly understand how I chuckle over this
bit of baseness.’[426] When an adversary, not content with rational
argument, resorted to personal attack: ‘I care not for his dull,
unvarying abuse of me, and singular misrepresentation. But at p. 244
he in fact doubts my deliberate word, and that is the act of a man
who has not the soul of a gentleman in him.’[427]

But, however at moments indignation might get the better of him,
Darwin, as we have already seen, rarely allowed himself to be
drawn into anything approaching controversy. Intelligent argument
with those who had reasonable objections might be profitable, but
where was the use of contending with those whose object was not
to convince but to prevail? ‘I do so hate controversy,’ he cries,
‘and feel I shall do it so badly.’[428] And elsewhere he writes,
more generally: ‘All that I think is that you will excite anger, and
that anger so completely blinds every one, that your arguments would
have no chance of influencing those who are already opposed to our
views.’[349]

With this general attitude, it is interesting to find Darwin, in one
of his few temptations to sharp retort, checked and repressed by the
great fighter Huxley. Darwin submits the draft of a crisp letter,
asking Huxley to criticize, and the latter suggests omissions:
‘Though Thomson deserved it and more, I thought it would be better to
refrain. If I say a savage thing, it is only “Pretty Fanny’s way”;
but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.’[350] Huxley and
other friends also restrained Darwin in perhaps the most annoying
of his controversial affairs, that with Samuel Butler over the
translation of Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin. It is not necessary
for us to attempt to unthread the complicated tangle of this dispute,
since we may start with the confident assumption that both men were
perfectly sincere in their good intentions. The curious may read the
whole story in the Life of Butler by Henry Festing Jones, and it is
pleasant to find that the biographers of Butler and of Darwin were
able to come together and by comparing unprinted documents straighten
out the difficulty to their mutual satisfaction.

With his fellow-workers, those who were following the same lines of
research from the same general point of view, Darwin’s relations were
most cordial and sympathetic. There was no jealousy, no rivalry, no
undue sensitiveness. We have indeed seen that in his treatment of his
predecessors, notably Lamarck, there was a suggestion of what in any
one else might be taken for a jealous attitude. But all the dealings
with Wallace nobly refute the possibility of any such suggestion.
And at all times and under all circumstances Darwin was ready to
recognize and to proclaim the merits and achievements of those who
were laboring beside him. When there was any question of priority in
an idea or a discovery, he refused to assert himself unduly: ‘I have
always had a strong feeling that no one had better defend his own
priority. I cannot say that I am as indifferent to the subject as I
ought to be, but one can avoid doing anything in consequence.’[351]
When a scientist, whether known or unknown, applied to him for
assistance or suggestion, he was always ready to supply it, so far as
was in his power. Above all, he was appreciative, almost to excess,
of any assistance that was rendered to him, and his gratitude to his
friends for supporting and sustaining him and forwarding his views is
touching in its naïve earnestness. To Huxley, to Hooker, to Lyell,
to Gray, to Häckel, to a dozen others, he speaks with enthusiastic
acknowledgment of their efforts and their contributions, and, as
Huxley points out, he was ready to bestow almost the same gratitude
for services that in themselves appeared to be absurdly insignificant.

For he had a singular humility, most notable and appealing in a man
of such distinguished power and achievement. ‘A mind conspicuous
for its powerful humility and strong gentleness,’ is Huxley’s vivid
characterization.[278] Again and again he expresses distrust of his
powers, sense of inadequacy and incompetence, keen consciousness of
limitation. Such phrases as the following from the book on Orchids,
are constantly recurring: ‘To any one with more knowledge than I
possess, it would be an interesting subject to trace the gradations
between the several species and groups of species in this great and
closely-connected order.’[279] Sometimes the expression of humility
is direct. ‘Any one with ordinary faculties, if he had _patience_
enough and plenty of time could have written my book.’[280]
Sometimes there is a humorous assertion of the contrary which is
quite as significant: ‘I should rather think there was a good chance
of my becoming the most egotistical man in Europe. What a proud
preëminence!’[281] Occasionally the profession of humility is so
extreme, as in the sentence in regard to Owen, ‘The Londoners say
he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about; what a
strange man to be envious of a naturalist like myself, immeasurably
his inferior!’[282] that critics disposed to find fault have
discerned something of affectation in it. It is of the nature of the
deepest humility always to expose itself to such accusations as this;
but surely no one can study Darwin carefully, can be familiar with
his work in all its aspects, and not set him down as one of the most
sincerely humble spirits that ever lived.


V

This humility and feeling of his own incompetence made Darwin keenly
alive to the difficulties connected with his great undertaking and
gave him such a clear sense of them that at times he felt incapable
of solving them at all. As he says in the sixth chapter of the
‘Origin’: ‘Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my
work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them
are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without
being in some degree staggered.’[283]

Take one of the most striking, if not the most crucial difficulties,
one which puzzled and perplexed Darwin from the first and was made
a fruitful text for criticism by his adversaries, the development
of the eye. Was it to be supposed that so delicate, so complex, and
so highly adapted an organ could be produced by mere accidental
variation working through inheritance and the gradual survival of
the fittest? And Darwin investigated and compared and reflected,
until he was ready to state his position thus: ‘Reason tells me,
that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one
complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful
to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further the eye ever
varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the
case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under
changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a
perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though
insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive
of the theory.’[284]

Sometimes the difficulties appear in themselves insignificant,
yet their bearing is such as to make them of extreme importance.
For example, how the useful institution of neuter insects could
be developed by inheritance was a terrible problem. It ‘at first
appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole
theory.’[285] Study and observation wear it away; yet it is disposed
of with the candid remark: ‘I must confess, that, with all my faith
in natural selection, I should never have anticipated that this
principle could have been efficient in so high a degree, had not
the case of these neuter insects led me to this conclusion.’[286]
Or there is the coloring of the peacock’s tail, which has to be
explained by extreme wrestlings of logical ingenuity. And again, as
compared with these seemingly petty obstacles, there are the great
questions involved in the essential tissue of the theory itself.
There are the gaps, the breaks, the missing links, not only between
man and his simian ancestors, but completing all the gradations
between all the existing forms of development. Many and many an
hour, and one may say, many a year of anxious thought did Darwin
bestow on this point. He could meet it only with such eager comment
as he makes after his prolonged study of the orchids: ‘In the
comparatively few orchids described in this volume, so many and such
plainly-marked gradations in the structure of the rostellum have been
described, ... that we may well believe, if we could see every orchid
which has ever existed throughout the world, we should find all
the gaps in the existing chain, and every gap in many lost chains,
filled up by a series of easy transitions.’[287] And there were such
vast problems as sexual selection and pangenesis, which we discussed
in a previous chapter, and there was even the central element of
natural selection itself, which in darker moments seemed but a weak
agency for sustaining the whole world: ‘If I think continuously on
some half-dozen structures of which we can at present see no use, I
can persuade myself that natural selection is of quite subordinate
importance.’[288]

The interesting aspect of this matter of difficulty, as with other
things, is Darwin’s way of meeting and facing it. There was an
excitement, a stimulus, undoubtedly, a joy in attacking tough
problems and conquering them. But there was also a pervading
consciousness of what the difficulties were, and some have even
thought an almost too pervading disposition to go out of one’s way
to deal with them. As Huxley puts it: One ‘who desires to attack Mr.
Darwin has only to read his works with a desire to observe not their
merits but their defects, and he will find ready to hand more adverse
suggestions than are likely ever to have suggested themselves to his
own sharpness, without Mr. Darwin’s self-denying aid.’[289]

And there is always the appreciation, in handling the difficulties,
of the danger in over-ingenuity, of the subtle possibilities of
betrayal by reason ever toiling with intense ardor to arrive at its
preconceived ends. ‘God knows I have never shirked a difficulty,’
said Darwin.[290] But the danger lies not only in shirking, but in
the dissolving, transforming power of prejudice and enthusiasm. Here
again Darwin tried to be ever on his guard: ‘I am fairly rabid on
the question, and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty sure to
become so.’[291] He would not be misled, or fooled, or betrayed: ‘As
I read on, I felt not a little dumbfounded, and thought to myself
that whenever I came to this subject I should have to be savage
against myself.’[292]

But you can never be sure that you have been savage enough, and
there are moments when unexpected obstacles make you mistrust your
theory, mistrust your method, mistrust your reasoning power. ‘If it
could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species
had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would
annihilate my theory.’[293] And who knows that it cannot be proved?
After months of study, a clear statement of opposing facts seems for
the moment to demolish everything. ‘You give all the facts so clearly
and fully, that it is impossible to help speculating on the subject;
but it drives me to despair, for I cannot gulp down your continent;
and not to be able to do so gives, in my eyes, the multiple
creationists an awful triumph.’[294] And with his extraordinary gift
of direct self-revelation, Darwin sums up the state of mind in one
vivid sentence: ‘Your letter actually turned me sick with panic.’[295]

Thus there are times of discouragement and disgust. One gets to feel
that one has utterly overestimated one’s work and one’s powers. One
concocts ‘pleasant little stinging remarks for reviews, such as
“Mr. Darwin’s head seems to have been turned by a certain degree
of success, and he thinks that the most trifling observations are
worth publication.”’[296] One concludes that all the years of vast
labor have been given to no valid result and that one had better
have cultivated one’s cabbages with health and quietness: ‘At
present I feel sick of everything, and if I could occupy my time
and forget my daily discomforts, or rather miseries, I would never
publish another word.’[297] Such periods of depression in Darwin are
peculiarly interesting, because he was by no means of a melancholy
temperament, nor, in spite of his nervous weakness, was he inclined
to a fretful or morbid pessimism. Yet, even with all his courage and
all his patience, with all his past labor and all his victory, there
were moments toward the end when the grave seemed inviting for its
mere vastness of repose, without any definite prospect of anything
further: ‘I am rather despondent about myself, and my troubles are of
an exactly opposite nature to yours, for idleness is downright misery
to me, as I find here, as I cannot forget my discomfort for an hour.
I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation
lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy; and I have no
little jobs which I can do. So I must look forward to Down graveyard
as the sweetest place on earth.’[372]


VI

The recognition and the accumulation of difficulties naturally
involved modification of views. Indeed any really vital theory is
bound to develop and modify itself with the vitality of the man who
holds it. And Darwin was as vital as any man, and his theories as
vital as any ever were. No man ever recognized more fully than he
the desirability, the necessity of modification: ‘I look at it as
absolutely certain that very much in the _Origin_ will be proved
rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.’[373]
He groans over the burden and difficulty of perpetual correcting: ‘I
am grieved to hear that you think I must work in the notes in the
text; but you are so much better a judge that I will obey.’[374]
Again: ‘It is only about two years since last edition of _Origin_,
and I am disgusted to find how much I have to modify, and how much
I ought to add.’[375] Nevertheless, as the successive editions of
the ‘Origin’ and the other books show, he continued to add and to
alter and to correct, to the very end. The minute, thoughtful,
and far-reaching character of these alterations shows well in the
concluding sentence of the eleventh chapter of the ‘Origin,’ which
in the first edition read, ‘old forms having been supplanted by new
and improved forms of life produced by the laws of variation still
acting round us and preserved by natural selection,’ and later, ‘old
forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, the
products of Variation and the Survival of the Fittest.’

Besides revision in detail, there was of course always a tendency
to larger modifications of the general theory. Ingenious and
far-reaching as natural selection was, the difficulties connected
with it were so immense, that the loyalty of even its discoverer
at times necessarily wavered, or perhaps we should say better, his
enthusiasm heated and cooled. Moreover, natural selection depended
upon variation, and variation to Darwin was always an inexplicable
puzzle, for which no solution or too many might be found. Disinclined
as he was to accept or even to respect his predecessors, Buffon
and Lamarck, Darwin in later years, when the pressure on natural
selection became fiercer, seemed to turn more to the adaptive
solutions of these predecessors. As Professor Morgan puts it:
‘Despite the contempt with which Darwin referred to Lamarck’s
theory, he himself, as we have seen, often made use of the principle
of the inheritance of acquired characters, and even employed the
same illustrations cited by Lamarck.’[376] And Professor Osborn
indicates admirably the gradual process of the change which took
place in Darwin’s attitude: ‘Starting with some leaning towards the
theories of modification of Buffon and Lamarck, he reached an almost
exclusive belief in his own theory, and then gradually inclined to
adopt Buffon’s and then Lamarck’s theories as well, until in his
maturest writings he embraced a threefold causation in the origin
of species.’[377] The drift towards Lamarck is well shown in a
passage of a letter to Galton, written in 1875: ‘If this implies
that many parts are not modified by use and disuse during the life
of the individual, I differ widely from you, as every year I come
to attribute more and more to such agency.’[378] At the same time,
to the very end natural selection remained in Darwin’s mind not
only the quintessence of his theorizing, but the prime agent by
which modification had been accomplished. In ‘The Descent of Man’
he explains and in a manner excuses any earlier undue insistence
upon it, but also reiterates his firm faith in its great, if not
omnipotent efficacy: ‘If I have erred in giving to natural selection
great power, which I am very far from admitting, or in having
exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least,
as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of
separate creations.’[379]


VII

So through the sixties and seventies the battle for evolution went
merrily on, and before Darwin’s death in 1881 it was evident that
the scientific world was largely converted and still more evident
that the theory had taken solid hold upon the popular mind. Even
in the sixties Charles Kingsley could write to F. D. Maurice: ‘The
state of the scientific mind is most curious; Darwin is conquering
everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth
and fact.’[380] Darwin himself was no aggressive fighter, though
perhaps his quiet, persistent, logical statement of facts went
further than fighting. But he had fighting followers, and they pushed
his cause with an energy and dogmatism which he himself could hardly
have manifested. In England Spencer gave the theory the metaphysical
and philosophical sanction and support which Darwin was not equipped
to render, and the brilliant, ardent eloquence of Huxley paralyzed
opponents with incisive argument and stinging ridicule. In America
Asa Gray, the great botanist, was a convert from the beginning and a
most helpful disciple, and his aid was peculiarly welcome to Darwin,
because Gray’s eager orthodoxy was useful in conciliating many whose
prejudices would naturally have been most adverse. Darwin repeatedly
spoke of Gray as understanding his ideas better and expounding them
more effectively than almost any one. John Fiske was also a valuable
champion from the more philosophical side. In Germany Weisman and
Häckel were the most prominent apostles, and immensely effective,
though, with thorough-going Teutonic logic, they were ready to push
conclusions to lengths that were not always acceptable to Darwin
himself.

The amount of popular interest is probably best shown in the
extensive sale of Darwin’s books. ‘The Origin of Species’ was
successful at once. It went through edition after edition, in
Darwin’s lifetime six in all, and was translated into numerous
foreign languages. The later books, even those of a more technical
character, sold like popular fiction, and the last one, on the
apparently uninviting subject of earthworms, found many readers
everywhere.

Darwin was of course quite conscious of his growing triumph.
Even hostility, animosity, execration, painful as they might be,
afforded evidence of power and achievement. And he would not have
been human, had he not relished the varied testimony of respect
and admiration which came to him from every quarter. His natural
distrust of himself was so great that it was hard for him to believe
in success, even when it came, and before it came, he deprecated
any attempt to discount it: ‘Please do not say to any one that I
thought my book on Species would be fairly popular, and have a fairly
remunerative sale (which was the height of my ambition), for if it
prove a dead failure, it would make me the more ridiculous.’[381]
Yet, however one might shrink and distrust oneself, to enter a great
scientific meeting and have every one present rise to do one honor
was undeniably agreeable. And, with his unfailing frankness, Darwin
admits that praise was pleasant, and one could not have too much of
it, provided one felt that it was in a measure deserved: ‘You pay me
a superb compliment, and as I have just said to my wife, I think my
friends must perceive that I like praise, they give me such hearty
doses.’[382] Also, with equal frankness, he makes it plain in his
autobiographical sketch that he realizes how great the success was
and that it implied a certain prospect of permanence: ‘My books have
sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages,
and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have
heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of
its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but
judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years.’[383]
When he died, he was unquestionably rated as one of the very first,
if not the first, among the scientific men of his time.

And it is equally unquestionable that his reputation has rather
increased than diminished ever since. ‘“Before and after Darwin” will
always be the _ante et post urbem conditam_ of biological history,’
says Professor Osborn.[384] Naturally Darwin’s theories have been
criticized and attacked and largely modified by later investigations
and discoveries. To Darwin himself variation, as the basis of natural
selection, was the difficult, inexplicable point, and the experiments
of Mendel, the mutation theory of De Vries, and many other lines of
research have put the subject of variation in a new light. Natural
Selection has been and will be the subject of controversy, both as to
its working and as to the extent of its efficacy. Darwin’s inimitable
caution left the way open for all these investigations, as is so
well indicated in the excellent sentence of Professor Whitehead:
‘Darwin’s own writings are for all time a model of refusal to go
beyond the direct evidence and of careful retention of every possible
hypothesis.’[385]

Yet, after fifty years of discussion and argument, Darwin’s main
positions hold their own with extraordinary tenacity. In the very
latest word on the subject Professor Parker says: ‘It is to the
credit of Charles Darwin and his body of able supporters that the
scientific world was finally brought to accept the principle of
descent with modification and natural selection as the means whereby
it was accomplished.’[386] Professor Conklin affirms that: ‘The only
scientific explanation of such adjustment or fitness is Darwin’s
principle of natural selection of the fit and elimination of the
unfit, and it is eloquent testimony to the greatness of Darwin
that more and more this great principle is being recognized as the
only mechanistic explanation of adaptation.’[387] And Professor
Osborn is equally emphatic: ‘In my opinion natural selection is
the only cause of evolution which has thus far been discovered and
demonstrated.’[388] While from a more abstractly philosophical point
of view the emphatic recently written words of Professor Ralph Barton
Perry, give ample support to the general Darwinian position: ‘In
truth there is no gulf between man and the animal. We cannot deny to
the latter sensibility, memory, and intelligence. The facts which
prove it would fill volumes.... The animal has feelings of mother
love, attachment, and devotion. It differs from us in degree only;
its “soul” is to ours what the bud is to the flower and fruit.’[234]

But, independent of all agreement or disagreement with Darwin’s
theories, the striking thing is the consensus of scientists in praise
of the man, and the recognition of his effort and method and life
as a model for all scientific workers. It is rare that praise is
so unalloyed, so persistent, and so complete. In this connection
it is interesting to compare the nature of the glory of the poet,
Shakespeare, for example, with that of the scientific writer.
Shakespeare is not only remembered, he is read. Every successive
generation takes up his plays for themselves, reads into them its own
passions and experiences, and thus makes them a perennial possession
of humanity, quite independent of their author. The works of Darwin,
or of any other scientist, have no such enduring value for actual
perusal. The curious study them for historical record. But for the
mass of mankind and even of scientists, a large part of them has
entered into universal knowledge and may be read in any textbook,
and the remainder has become obsolete and of no value except for what
it meant in an earlier day. The scientist’s name becomes detached
from the work, even though he remains great because he did it. Yet
the name, in spite of being thus detached, perhaps all the more
because it is detached, shines like a star through century after
century.




CHAPTER IV

DARWIN: THE LOSER


I

At different times Darwin commented on the gradually increasing
absorption of his life by scientific pursuits and on the consequent
atrophy of other intellectual and spiritual interests, which in
earlier days had meant a good deal to him. In other words he was
illustrating the favorite text of Sainte-Beuve, ‘All longings fail
except that to understand.’ Sometimes he expresses this loss with
terse vigor: ‘It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed
in any subject as I am in mine.’[309] Or again: ‘It is a horrid bore
to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every
subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though
God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which
makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.’[310]
And elsewhere he analyzes it with more elaborate regretful curiosity:
‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general
laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have
caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the
higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more
highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I
suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I
would have made a rule to read some poetry or listen to some music
at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now
atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.’[311]

[Illustration: THE STUDY AT DOWN]

Having recently had occasion to make a somewhat extended study of
Darwin’s remarkable contemporary the evangelist D. L. Moody, I have
been struck by this similarity of lack of general interest in both of
them. Darwin was of course a far better educated man fundamentally
than Moody. But in both, their very bigness and power made the one
engrossing passion—about as different in the two cases as can be
imagined—dwarf and drive out the varied distractions and desires
which relieve and stimulate the curiosity or the indolence of more
ordinary men. So far as Darwin is concerned, with the exaggeration
natural to reminiscence, he perhaps somewhat overestimated both
the original aptitude and the later atrophy. But it is exceedingly
instructive to trace his relation to the various occupations and
experiences of life outside of the scientific.

Take first the external human interests, other than purely social.
In the larger movements of history Darwin seems not to have been
particularly well versed or to have concerned himself very much with
them. Of course, in relying upon his volumes of published letters as
evidence, we must remember that those volumes were naturally edited
with a view in the main to scientific pursuits, and therefore it is
to be expected that other interests should figure less conspicuously.
Still the testimony, both positive and negative, to the unimportance
of those interests is very decided. As to this matter of history,
Darwin himself tells us that he read the historians in his youth.
He even insists that when he had lost æsthetic pleasures, ‘books on
history, biographies, and travels ... and essays on all sorts of
subjects interest me as much as ever they did.’[312] Of his earlier
life he records that ‘I used to sit for hours reading the historical
plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls
of the school.’[313] Perhaps on this Shakespearean basis, he retains,
with many other English conventions, that of reverence for rank,
though no more natural democrat ever lived, and he makes gentle fun
of himself for his snobbishness: ‘I have the true English reverence
for rank, and therefore liked to hear about the Princess Royal.’[314]

Nevertheless, in his letters and in his books, you get the sense that
the great currents of development in Europe and in the world were
not familiar to his thought. With the unfailing candor, he admits
this: ‘I believe your criticism is quite just about my deficient
historic spirit, for I am aware of my ignorance in this line.’[315]
And an acute and sympathetic analyst of his work, points out that it
suffered to some extent from the deficiency. The tendency to extend
evolutionary analogies from the individual to society was partly
Darwin’s fault, says this critic, because of his ‘embarking upon the
discussion of social and moral matters, in “The Descent of Man”;
matters concerning which he was little better informed than any other
non-specialist.’[316]

In contemporary politics it was not to be expected that Darwin should
have much immediate concern. One can hardly imagine a man less likely
to choose an active political career, or on the whole less adapted
to it, though the tact which enabled him to deal successfully with
his fellow-scientists would no doubt have been helpful in more
practical spheres. There are occasional glimpses of his taking some
part in local interests, and for a time at any rate he attended to
the judicial duties which we so generally associate with the English
country squire: ‘I attended the Bench on Monday, and was detained in
adjudicating some troublesome cases one and one half hours longer
than usual, and came home utterly knocked up, and cannot rally.’[317]

Darwin would not have been an Englishman, if he had not entertained
political opinions of some sort. He could not pretend to escape
the tradition so strongly planted in the blood of the race. He
does indeed resent the suggestion that politics are more important
than science: ‘Did you see a sneer some time ago in the _Times_
about how incomparably more interesting politics were compared with
science even to scientific men?... Jeffrey, in one of his letters,
I remember, says that making an effective speech in Parliament is a
far grander thing than writing the grandest history. All this seems
to me a poor short-sighted view.’[318] But he has been brought up
a Whig, a Liberal, and Whig prejudices are inherent in his system.
This was true in the early days of the Beagle voyage: ‘The Captain
does everything in his power to assist me, and we get on very
well, but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade
to Whig principles.’[319] And it remained true to old age. When
answering a questionnaire in 1873, he described himself as ‘Liberal
or Radical,’[320] but the radicalism was of a very conservative and
English order.

The Whig partisanship even shows itself in quite normal fashion
in hatred of the Tories, and on this head the tolerant and kindly
scientist expresses himself with a rather amusing bitterness: ‘Thank
God, the cold-hearted Tories, who, as J. Mackintosh used to say,
have no enthusiasm, except against enthusiasm, have for the present
run their race.’[321] But these outbursts are not to be taken very
seriously.

There are occasional glimpses of interest in current public men and
current public affairs. Lord Bryce gives a striking account of a
visit which Gladstone paid to the great thinker. Darwin’s comment
was, ‘he seemed to be quite unaware that he was a great man, and
talked to us as if he had been an ordinary person like ourselves.’ On
which Bryce remarks: ‘The friend who was with me and I could not but
look at each other and exchange covert smiles. We were feeling toward
Darwin just as he had felt toward Gladstone.’[322] During the early
portion of the Franco-German War Darwin’s sympathy, like that of many
Englishmen, was with Germany: ‘I have not yet met a soul in England
who does not rejoice in the splendid triumph of Germany over France:
it is a most just retribution against that vainglorious, war-liking
nation.’[323] But the struggles of party politics, as they went on
about him, aroused little attention and little ardor.

There was, however, one political event of his time that called
forth Darwin’s keen sympathy and extended comment, and that was
the American Civil War. As is well known, English opinion was much
divided on this question, and the prejudices of the upper class, at
any rate among the more conservative, were in favor of the South.
Although Darwin was by no means confident that the North would win,
he was strongly on that side from the start, and his numerous letters
to Asa Gray show how decided his feeling was.

The feeling was not based on the abstract political and
constitutional considerations that appealed to Americans, but on
Darwin’s rooted, bitter antipathy to the system of slavery in any
form. When he was in South America with the Beagle, he had plenty of
opportunity to watch the working of human servitude, and it disgusted
and repelled him beyond measure. ‘To this day, if I hear a distant
scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing
a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could
not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew
that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.... Near Rio
de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush
the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a
young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and
persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.’[324]
As a result of these experiences and many others, Darwin imbibed a
detestation of slavery and slave-holders which lasted through life,
and which led him to oppose them where he could, whether in England
or America.

The hostility to slavery was based even more deeply on an intense
hatred of cruelty, barbarity, and the infliction of physical
suffering of any sort. The dislike of such suffering was so keen that
from the start it incapacitated Darwin for the medical profession,
which his father would have been glad to see him follow. He could not
bear the sight of blood, and fled from an operation with disgust.
Ill-treatment of animals was especially tormenting to him, and he
interfered to prevent it, when he could: ‘He returned one day from
his walk pale and faint having seen a horse ill-used, and from the
agitation of violently remonstrating with the man.’[325]

With such a general sensibility, Darwin’s attitude towards
vivisection is extremely curious. Knowing as he did the importance of
animal experiment, he could not possibly range himself on the side
of the anti-vivisectionists. But he supported every effort to have
humanity legally emphasized and rigidly insisted upon. The nature
of his feeling in the matter appears clearly in a passage of ‘The
Descent of Man’: ‘Every one has heard of the dog suffering under
vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless
the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or
unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last
hour of his life.’[326]

In sociological questions of a broader bearing, which made no such
immediate appeal to his susceptibilities, Darwin took much less
interest. Now and then some special point arouses him. He was excited
about any attempt to interfere with the marriage of cousins, because
he had married his cousin and had in consequence largely investigated
the subject.[327] He was decidedly opposed to the English tradition
of primogeniture, and felt its unfairness. On the land-question
he writes to Wallace: ‘I see you are going to write on the most
difficult political question, the land. Something ought to be done;
but what, is the rub.’[328] In the same spirit of remoteness and
uncertainty, he writes also to Wallace in regard to Henry George’s
‘Progress and Poverty’: ‘I will certainly order “Progress and
Poverty,” for the subject is a most interesting one. But I read
many years ago some books on political economy, and they produced
a disastrous effect on my mind, viz., utterly to distrust my own
judgment on the subject, and to doubt much every one else’s judgment.
So =I feel= sure that Mr. George’s book will only make my mind worse
confounded than it is at present.’[329] But it is clear that the
remoteness did not imply contempt or cynical disregard, merely a
feeling of complete inability and diffidence in regard to economic
problems, and one is slow to condemn this state of mind, when one
thinks that such problems are usually dealt with and solved, if it
can be called so, by those in whose equipment freedom from diffidence
is the most aggressive and impressive instrument.


II

With artistic and general æsthetic matters, Darwin, at any rate in
later years, was even more indifferent than with political. It
is true that his scientific investigations sometimes involved the
abstract analysis of æsthetics: ‘I agree with what you say about
beauty. I formerly thought a good deal on the subject, and was led
quite to repudiate the doctrine of beauty being created for beauty’s
sake.’[330] The theory of sexual selection, as presented in ‘The
Descent of Man,’ necessitated a good deal of discussion of the
susceptibility to color and form and to music. But such æsthetic
discussion has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic enjoyment.

One thing may be said in regard to Darwin; with art as with
everything else, he was absolutely free from pretense. He says of one
writer, ‘The pretentiousness of her style is extremely disagreeable,
not to say nauseous to many persons.’[331] Anything artificial,
anything affected, was peculiarly repugnant to him, and never under
any circumstances would he have pretended to admire or to appreciate
a work of art that really left him cold. Indeed it was partly his
intense wish not to appear to feel what he did not feel that made him
inclined to underestimate his artistic pleasure as compared with the
raptures of those who exclaimed conventionally over what they neither
understood nor enjoyed.

Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that art in its varied forms
hardly afforded Darwin the delight and solace that it brings to
many persons. The theater he cared little for at any period of his
life. The effort, fatigue, and constraint outweighed the charm.
Mrs. Darwin, who was a lover of average plays, though she found
Shakespeare tedious and said so with something of her husband’s
candor, is quite anxious on the subject: ‘The real crook in my lot
I have withheld from you, but I must own it to you sooner or later.
It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am
afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head.’[332]
Later she takes him to see Macready in ‘Richelieu’ and hopes that
he is getting converted, but there are no signs that the hopes were
finally realized.

With the plastic arts the case is somewhat better. There is little
reference to architecture. One passage in a letter seems to suggest
the feeling of cathedral grandeur, but the æsthetic quickly turns
into the scientific bearing: ‘Possibly the sense of sublimity
excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the
vague feelings of terror and superstition in our savage ancestors,
when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest.’[333] As regards
pictures, his son thinks that he did keep up his love of them to a
certain extent.[334] His biographer remarks: ‘His love of pictures as
a young man is almost a proof that he must have had an appreciation
of a portrait as a work of art, not as a likeness.’[335] And the
biographer adds, with entire justice: ‘This way of looking at
himself as an ignoramus in all matters of art, was strengthened by
the absence of pretence, which was part of his character.’[336] The
immediate recognition of a Salvator Rosa scene in one of the Beagle
experiences shows an acquaintance with painting in its different
forms and periods.[337] Yet pictures make a different showing in
Darwin’s letters from what they have in Edward FitzGerald’s, for
instance.

The form of art which meant most to Darwin and into which he seemed
to enter with the nearest approach to ecstasy was music. Here again,
there is a good deal of theoretical discussion, which at times
appears of a nature to dampen emotional enjoyment. But there can be
no question that with Darwin as a young man the emotional enjoyment
was there, and sincere, and profound, even at times overmastering. He
does indeed confess that his musical ear was not fine or perfect: ‘I
am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord,
or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I
could possibly have derived pleasure from music.’[338] But it is
manifest that he did derive such pleasure, and went out of his way
to seek it: ‘I also got into a musical set.... From associating with
these men, and hearing them play I acquired a strong taste for music,
and used very often to time my walks so as to hear on week days the
anthem in King’s College Chapel.’[339]

The love was for good music, too, not by any means for what was
trashy or cheap. He liked Beethoven and Händel, had the natural
instinct for the high and fine, in this as in other matters. Mrs.
Darwin took him to classical concerts and he responded much more
heartily than to the theater. He liked to have his wife and his
sisters play to him, and when he was absent with the Beagle, he
wrote: ‘I hope your musical tastes continue in due force. I shall be
ravenous for the pianoforte.’[340]

And the enjoyment was not merely perfunctory, but went deep, and
took hold of the nerves. ‘At the end of one of the parts, which was
exceedingly impressive, he turned round to me and said, with a deep
sigh, “How’s your backbone?” He often spoke of coldness or shivering
in his back on hearing beautiful music.’[341] The references to
this thrill, this tension of nervous musical excitement, occur
occasionally even in Darwin’s more scientific works.

And then there is the recurring doubt, the mistrust of one’s
sincerity, the desperate dread of sentimental convention in these
artistic matters: ‘This gave me intense pleasure, so that my backbone
would sometimes shiver. I am sure that there was no affectation or
mere imitation in this taste, for I used generally to go by myself to
King’s College, and I sometimes hired the chorister boys to sing in
my rooms.’[342]

But, affectation or not, the musical enthusiasm vanished, and the
encroaching, all-absorbing growth of the scientific preoccupation
crowded it out. Indeed, any one who is susceptible to musical
delight, appreciates how elusive it is, how much it depends upon
favorable conditions and surroundings, and how peculiarly its
delicate and subtle quality is subject to erasure by distractions
of a different order. And Darwin’s comment on the disappearance of
his pleasure in music is: ‘I have said that formerly pictures gave
me considerable, and music very great delight.... I have also almost
lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking
too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving
me pleasure.’[343]

With the enjoyment of beauty in literary forms, Darwin’s sense
of loss was quite as keen as with music. Of the higher and finer
elements of style and imagination there is little evidence that he
was conscious. Such consciousness would not seem very compatible with
his remark about Buckle: ‘To my taste he is the very best writer
of the English language that ever lived, let the other be who he
may.’[344]

In this connection it is interesting to consider Darwin’s own style,
as it appears in the vast mass of his production, running probably,
letters and all, to over two million words. In this mass there are
occasional passages of appealing beauty or startling effectiveness,
for example, the charming sentence, written in age, ‘I should very
much like to see you again, but you would find a visit here very
dull, for we feel very old and have no amusement, and lead a solitary
life,’[345] or the much earlier passage: ‘This letter is a most
untidy one, but my mind is untidy with joy.’[346]

But Darwin, in writing, would have bestowed no thought or care on
such qualities as these. He had a great discovery to give to the
world. His one desire was to give it accurately, lucidly, and in a
form that would convince, and it was his despair that he thought
nature had not endowed him with the gifts for doing this. He envies
the admirable literary skill of Huxley and Spencer and deplores his
own inability to get his thoughts and ideas into a shape that would
force mankind to read and understand them: ‘I do not believe any man
in England naturally writes so vile a style as I do.’[347]

Which is a gross exaggeration and belongs to the humility so
manifest in other and more important matters. It is true that there
are curious lapses from mere formal correctness, as in the rather
attractive misuse of ‘like,’ which occasionally occurs: ‘Few have
observed like you have done.’[348] It is true, also, that Darwin
had not the swift and eloquent vigor of Huxley, which has sometimes
virile energy enough to make force of statement appear like truth
of fact. But no one, I think, can read Darwin at all widely without
getting to feel a singular charm in the absolute simplicity of his
manner of expressing himself. To be sure, Huxley suggests that
the very simplicity is sometimes misleading: ‘A somewhat delusive
simplicity of style, which tends to disguise the complexity and
difficulty of the subject.’[275] But when so many writers make simple
subjects difficult, it would surely be ungracious to complain of one
who makes a difficult subject simple. As I have before suggested,
Darwin’s perfect candor, his absolute sincerity, his intense and
obvious effort to have you think with him, seem to take the place of
great literary qualities and to give his prose a revealing directness
which is quite lacking to some who are more highly skilled.

Especially is this the case with the correspondence, where finish
and technical perfection are of less importance than the power of
spontaneous spiritual contact. In maintaining this contact there
are few letter-writers who can surpass Darwin, and his four solid
volumes, technical and scientific as they are, have a singular and
persistent appeal to those who have a taste for that kind of writing.

As to his own personal enjoyment of literature, one form of it
at least continued to attract him to the very last, and that was
fiction. Relief from the strain of his scientific labors was best
found in stories which distracted and absorbed: ‘He was extremely
fond of novels,’ says his son, ‘and I remember well the way in which
he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as
he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both
in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand
how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel
as a feminine vice.’[276] Darwin himself confirms this statement:
‘Novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very
high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to
me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been
read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they
do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.’[277]
He enjoyed Miss Austen, he adored Scott, and cites the Laird of
Redgauntlet’s facial peculiarity in the book on Expression. He did
not like realism, even in the mild form practiced by George Eliot,
and he wished things and people to be agreeable: ‘A novel, according
to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains
some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all
the better.’[197]

But for the higher orders of literature, the loss was indubitable,
and Darwin himself makes it very emphatic. He tells us that in his
youth he enjoyed poetry. Shakespeare was his favorite reading. He
read Thomson and Byron, and he got much pleasure from ‘Paradise
Lost’: ‘Formerly Milton’s “Paradise Lost” had been my chief
favorite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the _Beagle_,
when I could take only a single volume, I always chose Milton.’[198]
The solid evidence of this enjoyment is the frequent reference to
poetical reading in Darwin’s books. Even in connection with strictly
scientific topics he is apt to introduce some citation from the poets
which not only proves his point, but shows his familiarity.

Yet in later years all this poetical interest disappeared, and Darwin
bewails the disappearance deeply. Shakespeare, who had touched and
stirred him, ceases to awaken any emotion, rings merely hollow and
empty: ‘Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry:
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably
dull that it nauseated me.’[199]

A clever writer in the Popular Science Monthly some years ago
endeavored to prove that here, as in other things, Darwin’s humility
much exaggerated his defects, and that his natural poetical sympathy
was greater than he recognized. This writer urges Darwin’s early
enjoyment and his constant, apt, and accurate quotation to establish
the thesis: ‘By his unconscious confession and the evidence of
his written works, his mind was leavened with poetic feeling; all
through his mature life he is ready with quotation when the occasion
calls; and the very poignancy of his regret for the loss of poetry
witnesses to his poetic endowment.’[200] But the contention though
ingenious, is exaggerated. Darwin’s quick intelligence was interested
in the substance of Shakespeare and Milton and other poets and prose
writers. But it seems to me impossible that any one who had really
felt the high stimulus of the splendor of Shakespeare’s imagination
could ever have lost it to any such extent as Darwin deplores with
obvious sincerity. Sainte-Beuve had as wide and varied a scientific
curiosity as Darwin’s. But he said when he was well over fifty, ‘I
rarely write about poetry, precisely because I have loved it so much
and because I still love it more than anything else.’[201] Goethe’s
old age was filled with scientific preoccupations, yet the glory of
poetry was more to him than any possible science.


III

The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic
matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature
and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the
rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have
often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other
field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and
thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more
real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of
æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded
and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as
impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or
overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of
the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world.

To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the
excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and
sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a
butterfly, the

‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’

And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate,
too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many
who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high
intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase:
‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a
lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]

The secret of the enjoyment must lie mainly in obscure processes of
association, hints and suggestions of buried joy and sorrow, which go
down deep into the roots of subconscious memory. But at any rate it
is true that such enjoyment is bound up far more with simple scenes
and home surroundings than with the remote or the picturesque or what
Darwin so often refers to as the sublime. The hurrying tourist, who
rushes about the world in search of some higher mountain or rougher
glacier or wilder valley is not the one who feels the secret charm of
nature, but rather he who strolls in lonely, quiet fields or woods
that he has always known and loved. The return of violets in early
spring, the song of thrushes in summer twilights, these are the
things that bring tears, that come full charged with the weight of
all that Cowper means when he writes of

‘Scenes that soothed Or charmed me young, no longer young I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still.’[203]

And it is in this matter of association that the poets most of all
help us. It is they who can disentangle the subtle threads of emotion
and thought that have twined themselves about the simple impressions
of the natural world, and who in turn can interweave a tissue of
still more splendid imaginative glory with all our sight and all our
hearing. It is Shakespeare with his

‘Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of
March with beauty.’

it is Keats, with his

‘Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,’

or his,

‘Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,’

who store our souls with memories that vibrate at the sight of
daffodils and violets and stars.

And the imagination goes further yet, interpenetrates the whole of
nature, transforms it, makes it a living, sentient unity, wholly
unlike the dead multiplicity on which the scientist exercises his
ingenious research. Take Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and compare it with
Darwin’s book on Earthworms. The Darwin has its fascination: it makes
you long to spend your days watching and testing and measuring the
tiny creatures who are forever making over the surface of the globe.
But the Emerson transfuses all this natural world with thought, with
creative human intelligence, dissolves it, moulds it, re-creates
it, tosses and turns it till it seems a ball and a trifle for the
overmastering soul of man to produce or abolish as it will. Or again,
with Wordsworth, there is the sense of animating life in nature, the
dim, impersonal personality, which is for ever passing and repassing
through the endless manifestations that are all the scientist can
count or measure,

‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts.’

And as there is the sense of this profounder life in nature, this
deeper, mysterious unity, back of all the varied shift and change,
so there is the passionate desire to be at one with that unity, to
lose one’s miserable, insignificant, turbulent, tormenting I in that
vast, illimitable, measureless All. There is the thirst of Shelley’s
‘Adonais’:

‘That sustaining love, Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as
each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst.’

There is Byron’s cry:

‘I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that about me, and to
me High mountains are a feeling.’[204]

And with the realization that the longing cannot be satisfied,
that we are forever imprisoned within the insuperable barriers
of this petty I, from which there is no escape, comes a bitter
revolt of despair, or a profound melancholy of questioning. It is
Obermann, with his, ‘There, in the peace of night, I questioned my
uncertain destiny, and this inconceivable universe, which, containing
everything yet does not contain my desires.’[205] Or, as an American
contemporary has expressed the deep suggestion of the earnest stars:
‘O Lyra, I have gazed at you, until I could not tell your brightness
from my own eyes. I have gazed at you till my soul left my body, and
circled with you through the stars; but there is something which I am
and you are not, something which will not let me rest....

‘Infinite Intelligence! Infinite Beauty! Either make me what thou
art, take me to thyself, or free me from this passion which I cannot
gratify and cannot destroy. Make me as other men are, toilers and
forgetters, seeking yesterday in to-day, and to-day in to-morrow, and
illusion always; or fulfill for me the hope which the waters whisper,
which I can feel throbbing forever in the heart of thy world.’

Of all this in Darwin nothing whatever, nothing, nothing. It may
indeed be said that with nature, as with other things, many people
have feelings and experiences that they do not express or try to
express. But persons who cherish such experiences with the natural
world usually have a more constant regard and interest for the
expression of them in others than Darwin had. Any such melancholy
or passionate longing as is suggested above one would of course not
expect in him. There was no natural melancholy in his temperament. He
was depressed and discouraged when things went badly, yet in the main
his disposition was even and serene. But his enjoyment of natural
scenes and objects, which is indisputable and proved by his own
testimony and that of others, would seem to have been generally of a
rather superficial character, and certainly not to have partaken of
the nature of passion. How far, far different is his touch from that
of Lucretius, for example.

Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He
enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s
account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire
the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower
itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem
to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the
same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally,
also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper
feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At
last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds
singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some
woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as
ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or
birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a
scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth.
There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor
bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles,
distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I
was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full
orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking
touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a
decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable,
and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in
the Forest of Fontainebleau.

But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the
different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough
that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the
growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied
that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not
emotional.


IV

As with sociology and with æsthetic experience, so, and even more,
with God and the things of God, Darwin’s limitations are profoundly
interesting, and if the loss was less, because there was less to
lose, it was nevertheless, in all its aspects significant. Here
again, as with æsthetic emotion, it must be remembered that men do
not utter all they feel, and those who feel most sometimes utter
least. But it so happens that circumstances obliged Darwin to be very
explicit about his religious views and experiences, so that we are
justified in assuming that we have access to pretty much all there
was.

It must never be forgotten that Darwin grew up in the thoroughly
conventional atmosphere of the English Church. Neither his father nor
his grandfather was an active believer, but the immense tradition
of staid decorum, from which the English upper middle class rarely
escapes, was all about his boyhood, and left an indelible mark on
it. To appreciate how haunting and oppressive the atmosphere was,
one should read ‘A Century of Family Letters,’ edited by Darwin’s
daughter. The flavor of established religious propriety is so
overwhelming that one wonders how Darwin could ever have shaken
himself intellectually free from it.

Mrs. Darwin was a wise and a charming woman, and she was invaluable
to her husband, but, oh, she was English. She took a proper wifely
interest in Darwin’s scientific adventures, and was sometimes of
assistance to him. She had her anxieties about the animosity of
his critics and also about the drift of his speculations, and her
daughter implies that in later years these speculations effected a
change in the mother’s religious beliefs.[210] But I relish very
much this lovely passage of solicitude for the husband’s eternal
welfare, written in the year of the publication of the ‘Origin’: ‘I
am sure you know I love you well enough to believe that I mind your
sufferings, nearly as much as I should my own, and I find the only
relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, and to try to
believe that all suffering and illness is meant to help us to exalt
our minds and to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see
your patience, deep compassion for others, self-command, and above
all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you, I cannot help
longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven
for the sake of your daily happiness.’[211] Also, Mrs. Darwin was a
careful observer of that augustly hideous institution, the Victorian
Sunday: ‘I remember she persuaded me,’ writes a reminiscent relative,
‘to refuse any invitation from the neighbors that involved using the
carriage on that day, and it was a question in her own mind whether
she might rightly embroider, knit, or play patience.’[212] It strikes
me as peculiarly delightful that the Sabbath should be treated with
such reverence in the house of one who was to do more than any one
else to smash the God of the Sabbath altogether.

So it is evident that Darwin grew up with a strong religious habit.
There was even serious talk of his entering the church, till his
hopeless lack of vocation made it clearly impossible. The net of
religious inheritance and circumstance was woven closely about him
and in the early days he recognized himself as in general orthodox
enough. I like particularly the reply he made to his Catholic friends
in South America, who conjured him to see the light: ‘Why do you not
become a Christian—for our religion is certain?’ ‘I assured them
I was a sort of Christian.’[213] A sort of Christian! Isn’t that
charmingly characteristic? You can imagine millions of fanatics
to-day howling, ‘What sort of Christian?’

One thing at least is certain: Darwin never was cynical or mocking in
his attitude toward religion. Without the least trace of affectation
or cant, he always spoke of the church and the clergy and religious
practice with respect, and with the same gentle tolerance that he
displayed towards those who differed from him in any line. Peculiarly
significant in this regard are his references to the missionaries
with whom he came into contact on his southern voyage. He was at
first disposed to speak of them without enthusiasm, to say the
least, and Admiral Sullivan, who was with him on the Beagle, tells
of his scepticism about missionary work, ‘his conviction that it was
utterly useless to send missionaries to such a set of savages as
the Fuegians.’[214] Many years later Darwin was entirely converted,
and, as usual, did not hesitate to say so: ‘He wrote me that he had
been wrong and I right in our estimates of the native character,
and the possibility of doing them good through missionaries; and he
requested me to forward to the Society an enclosed cheque for £5, as
a testimony of the interest he took in their good work.’[215] Other
passages could be adduced to the same effect.

And the religious training and the constant presence of high-minded
and earnest living and meaning people about him had established in
Darwin a secure habit of morals and a vivid activity of conscience.
He might subject the moral habit in theory to cold analysis, ‘The
moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through
the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just
public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been
rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of
habit, example, instruction, and reflection.’[216] But the analysis
did not in the least affect his own personal instinct of right and
upright living.

It is not only that there is no appearance or record of irregularity
of conduct of any kind. But, much more than this, there is repeated
evidence of the nicest scrupulousness and a tender conscience which
would not be surpassed in the most devout and anxious Christian. It
was perhaps ‘a sort of Christian,’ but assuredly not a bad sort,
who, as I have before mentioned, got up in the middle of the night
to correct a fancied misstatement, not about a scientific fact, but
about an æsthetic experience.[298] And a clerical friend records a
similar incident, equally striking: ‘On one occasion, when a parish
meeting had been held on some disputed point of no great importance,
I was surprised by a visit from Mr. Darwin at night. He came to say
that, thinking over the debate, though what he had said was quite
accurate, he thought I might have drawn an erroneous conclusion, and
he would not sleep till he had explained it.’[299] With the members
of his own family there was the same scrupulous, tender anxiety not
to do or say anything unjust or unkind. After some quite warrantable
and reasonable outburst of indignation over the levity of one of his
sons, ‘The next morning at seven o’clock he came to my bedroom and
said how sorry he was that he had been so angry and that he had not
been able to sleep; and with a few kind words he left me.’[300] This
‘sort of Christian’ is perhaps not even yet so common as might be
wished.

On the other hand, when we come to the more intimate, personal
aspects of the religious life, Darwin’s record appears to be largely
negative, and what earlier traces there are gradually disappear.
Take prayer. Here again, in the study of Expression, we have the
scientific analysis, of prayer as an attitude at any rate: ‘Hence it
is not probable that either the uplifting of the eyes or the joining
of the open hands under the influence of devotional feelings, are
innate or truly expressive actions, and this could hardly have been
expected, for it is very doubtful whether feelings, such as we should
rank as devotional, affected the hearts of men, whilst they remained
during past ages in an uncivilized condition.’[301] Also, there are
other occasional references to the external aspects of religious
petition, as in the Beagle Journal: ‘He prayed as a Christian should
do, with fitting reverence, and without the fear of ridicule or any
ostentation of piety.’[302]

But to prayer as a personal experience I find only one single
allusion. When Darwin was a boy, he was a good runner, often
took part in races, and was often successful. His explanation of
his success at that time is interesting: ‘When in doubt I prayed
earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my
success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how
generally I was aided.’[303] This recalls the youthful experience of
Moody, who was caught under a fence rail and could not move, but put
up earnest prayers to God, and then was able to lift the rail quite
easily.

Prayer played a very different part in Moody’s later life from what
it did in Darwin’s, so far as any tangible evidence goes. It is true
that probably a good many men pray whom one would never suspect of
doing so. I had an old friend, who had been brought up devoutly but
had been a Unitarian for years, rarely going to church, apparently
indifferent to religion, and discussing speculative, ultimate
problems with annihilating freedom. Yet he told me, in an outburst
of confidence, that every night, when he went to bed, he repeated,
in substance, if not in words, the prayers that he had learned at
his mother’s knee. ‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said; ‘I don’t
know whether there is a God, or whether He hears me, or what I want
of Him; but I pray.’ And I, who had not prayed for thirty years,
heard him with amazement. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Darwin
repeated ‘Now I lay me’ to the end, or prayed for triumph with
evolution as he had prayed for triumph in the foot-race.

The question of a future life seems to have had as little actuality
for Darwin as that of prayer, and we have more explicit evidence on
the point, because correspondents were always writing for a statement
of his beliefs. He never committed himself to any complete assertion
of disbelief. On the contrary, he is quite ready to admit some
forcible positive arguments: ‘Believing as I do that man in the
distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is,
it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings
are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow
progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul,
the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.’[304] Yet
the difficulties seem insuperable, and he is hardly able to accept
any definite belief: ‘Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy
about immortality ... by intuition; and I suppose I must differ from
such persons because I do not feel any innate conviction upon such
points.’[305]

The supreme test as to the future is the death of those we love
and the thought of our own death. In 1851 Darwin lost a little
daughter whom he loved tenderly. His intimate letters at that time
have affectionate and pathetic references to her; but there is not
one word in them to indicate the slightest hope of ever meeting her
again. When he himself was close to the end, mentally clear but with
no prospect of recovery, his calm words were: ‘I am not the least
afraid of death.’[306]

As to the question of God, Darwin’s statements are as elaborate as
in regard to immortality, and for the same reason, because eager
inquirers were determined to find out where he stood. In early
life, while he still believed in the theory of special creations,
he accepted the deistic view without hesitation: ‘Many years ago,
when I was collecting facts for the “Origin,” my belief in what is
called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself.’[307]
As the years went on, the working out of his theories involved a
profound change, but still he never at any time admitted an absolute
disbelief or a militant atheism. He goes over and over the old, old
arguments. How could an omnipotent God, who desired the good of all
his creatures, inflict upon the travailing creation such an infinity
of misery? Again, there is the puzzle of design and providential
interference. He is reluctant to believe that this vast and ordered
whole came together by mere chance; yet he debates with Asa Gray the
possible providence in the fall of a sparrow: ‘An innocent and good
man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do
you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God _designedly_
killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and
don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps
up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap
up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that
the man and the gnat are in the same predicament.’[308] Nor does the
Pantheistic solution appeal much more than the anthropomorphic one.
Darwin is constantly personifying Nature, with a capital N; but he is
careful to specify that he does this for convenience, and that Nature
means only the sum of natural laws in their eternal working, not any
mysterious force of Divinity. The Pantheistic solution also creates
as many puzzles as it solves. So the conclusion is, to leave all such
questions as hopeless and insoluble, beyond the intelligence of man
so completely that it does not seem intended that he should grapple
with them. And Darwin at least was satisfied to weigh and measure and
experiment and let God go.

It does not appear that he felt the need and the longing and the
desire that torture some of us. Like some other men, perhaps like
many others, the life of this world, the work of this world, the
pleasure of this world, the interest of this world, were enough
for him, and the other world might simply wait its turn. And as in
beginning this chapter I compared the evangelist Moody with the
scientist Darwin in their extreme limitation of interests, so at the
end I would compare them again to bring out the enormous difference.
To Darwin the mere fact of life in the universe and the endless
curiosity about it were enough. Whether God was there or not was a
matter that could not be settled and need not be discussed. To Moody
both life and the universe were nothing without God.




CHAPTER V

DARWIN: THE LOVER


I

If Darwin was not conspicuous as a lover of God, he was at least
notable in every way as one who loved his fellow men. He liked to
meet people, liked to talk with them, liked to have them about
him. He was interested in humanity, enjoyed the contact of it, and
felt in others the warm throb of a heart that beat as kindly and
sympathetically as his own. Men, women, and children were drawn to
him and recognized a friend.

Of his personal appearance the chief impression that comes to us is
naturally in age. He was tall and powerfully built, and in his youth
must have been attractive to look at, though there is no definite
record of this. In later years his aspect was dignified without
being severe. ‘His face is massive,’ writes Norton to Ruskin, with
‘little beauty of feature, but much of expression.’[235] What seems
to have chiefly impressed observers was the eyes and the look in
them. Professor Osborn says: ‘The impression of Darwin’s bluish-gray
eyes, deep-set under overhanging brows, was that they were the
eyes of a man who could survey all nature.’[236] And Bryce agrees:
‘The feature which struck one most was the projecting brow with
its bushy eyebrows, and deep beneath it the large gray-blue eyes
with their clear and steady look. It was an alert look, as of one
accustomed to observing keenly, yet it was also calm and reflective.
There was a pleasant smile which came and passed readily, but the
chief impression made by the face was that of tranquil, patient
thoughtfulness, as of one whose mind had long been accustomed to fix
itself upon serious problems.’[237]

There is general testimony as to Darwin’s ready hospitality and eager
kindliness in greeting all those who came into his household. There
was no reserve or assumption of dignity, but a perfectly natural and
cordial desire and disposition to make every one feel at home. I do
not know any more impressive witness to this charm of manner than
Leslie Stephen, who was certainly not a man to be unduly carried
away. Stephen speaks of ‘the charm which no one to whom I have ever
spoken failed to perceive in his presence and in his writings.’[238]
And he elsewhere dwells upon it more elaborately: ‘He was in town
for a few days and most kindly called upon me. You may believe that
I was proud to welcome him, for of all eminent men that I have ever
seen he is beyond comparison the most attractive to me. There is
something almost pathetic in his simplicity and friendliness. I heard
a story the other day about a young German admirer whom Lubbock took
to see him. He could not summon up courage to speak to the great man;
but, when they came away, burst into tears. That is not my way; but I
sympathize to some extent with the enthusiastic Dutchman.’[239]

The accounts of Darwin’s conversation are as attractive as of his
appearance and manner. That he entered into it usually with intense
eagerness appears from his own account of his fatigue from it: ‘I
find that on my good days, when I can write for a couple of hours,
that anything which stirs me up like talking for half or even a
quarter of an hour, generally quite prostrates me, sometimes even for
a long time afterwards.’[240] But it is very evident that he did not
engross the talk and even after his high position was established had
not the slightest tendency to hold forth or deliver orations, as is
the habit of some distinguished men. Norton even declares that ‘His
talk is not often memorable on account of brilliancy or impressive
sayings—but it is always the expression of the qualities of mind and
heart which combine in such rare excellence in his genius.’[241]

Instead of himself talking to excess, he liked to draw his visitors
out, to get at their interests and their point of view, not in any
intrusive fashion, but with instinctive sympathy, and with his
natural modest sense that their affairs were more important than his
own. He clearly had in a high degree the exquisite art of listening
intelligently, and of asking questions which would bring out all that
was best and most profitable in the person with whom he happened to
be talking. This well appears in Charles Kingsley’s account of his
first interview with him: ‘I was deeply moved at meeting for the
first time Darwin. I trembled before him like a boy, and longed to
tell him all I felt for him, but dare not, lest he should think me a
flatterer extravagant. But the modesty and simplicity of his genius
was charming. Instead of teaching, he only wanted to learn, instead
of talking, to listen, till I found him asking me to write papers
which he could as yet hardly write himself—ignorant in his grand
simplicity of my ignorance and of his own wisdom.’[242]

The conversation was not by any means always serious. It does not
appear that Darwin had any great enjoyment of humorous literature.
Nor was he inclined to witty flings or brilliant repartee. His mind
worked too slowly for a rapid-fire exchange of this sort. It was only
occasionally that he hit out at a promising interlocutor, as when
he remarked to Lady Derby, who had been describing her remarkable
peculiarities of vision, ‘Ah, Lady Derby, how I should like to
dissect you.’[243] Above all, he had no taste for the satirical or
bitter, and it was only under extreme provocation that he could write
to Huxley: ‘God bless you!—get well, be idle, and always reverence a
bishop.’[244]

But he was full of genial, kindly fun, and was ready to see the
laughable side of little incidents and even great. He laughed
heartily and frequently and with an infectious gayety and buoyancy.
He liked merry and humorous talk, with plenty of anecdote and
sparkle, and he was ready to chaff and joke his friends and to take
the same sort of thing himself. He was even willing to find a comic
side in the sacred subject of natural selection and to turn his
own deepest interests into matter for smiles when the occasion was
suitable. Thus he writes to Lubbock, of his son: ‘See what it is to
be well trained. Horace said to me yesterday, “If every one would
kill adders they would come to sting less.” I answered, “Of course
they would, for there would be fewer.” He replied indignantly: “I
did not mean that; but the timid adders which run away would be
saved, and in time they would never sting at all.” Natural selection
of cowards!’[245]

In Darwin’s later years he might of course have been crowded with
social engagements all the time. Everybody wanted to see him, to
know him, to talk with him, to entertain him. The preoccupation of
his work and the limitations of his health made any such social
activity impossible, and it is not likely that he greatly missed it.
Yet, wherever he went, he was welcome, his society was appreciated,
not only for his reputation, but for itself, and when he could get
about, it evidently gave him pleasure: ‘I dined with Bell at the
Linnean Club, and liked my dinner ... dining out is such a novelty
to me that I enjoyed it.’[246] At an earlier period, when there was
more strength to spare for such diversions, he entered into them with
hearty enthusiasm, and even, it appears, with a thorough rollicking
zest. When he settled himself in Cambridge, after his return from
the Beagle voyage, he complained that the only trouble was that
life was too pleasant and some agreeable party every evening made
morning labor rather difficult.[247] And of the miscellaneous social
gatherings of still earlier days he writes: ‘We used often to dine
together in the evening, though these dinners often included men of
a higher stamp, and we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing
and playing at cards afterwards. I know that I ought to feel ashamed
of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very
pleasant, and we were all in the highest spirits, I cannot help
looking back to these times with much pleasure.’[248]

In the matter of sports and diversions Darwin’s tastes seem to have
run rather to those which are not in their nature social, though what
attracted him was the character of the sports themselves, and not the
element of solitude. In his youth he was passionately fond of outdoor
sport, of fishing and hunting. He had a keen love for angling, he
says, and would sit for hours watching his float in some solitary
pool or stream, though when some one told him that he could kill the
angle worms with salt and water instead of spitting them on the hook,
it was a great relief to his feelings.[249] He was especially eager
with a gun, and long before he took the slightest interest in the
scientific study of birds, he liked to kill them. He tells us that
the killing of his first snipe excited him so much that he trembled
till it was difficult to reload his gun. Even after his scientific
interest had begun to develop, he dropped every vestige of it in the
shooting season: ‘at that time I should have thought myself mad to
give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other
science.’[250]

He became an excellent shot and, as his son says, had all his life a
remarkable power of coördinating his movements, so that he was not
only accurate with a gun, but in throwing, and after he was a grown
man, simply to test his skill, he threw a marble at a cross-beak
and killed it: ‘He was so unhappy at having uselessly killed the
cross-beak that he did not mention it for years, and then explained
that he should never have thrown at it if he had not felt sure that
his old skill had gone from him.’[251] Perhaps the most striking
witness to the depth of Darwin’s passion for these field sports is
the unusually harsh remark of his father who loved his son and was
deeply beloved by him: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs,
and rat-catching, and will be a disgrace to yourself and all your
family.’[252] Which is not the first case of imperfect prevision on
the part of a father, nor the last.

Of games that are more essentially social, there is no indication
that Darwin was an ardent practitioner. When he was at school he
played ‘batfives,’[253] but there is no mention of football or
cricket. In describing his personal tastes in later years, he speaks
of cards with something of contempt: ‘Have not played for many years,
but I am sure I should not remember.’[254] His tone about them in
1842, however, is quite different: ‘This walk was rather too much for
me, and I was dull till whist, which I enjoyed beyond measure.’[255]
In 1859, the year of the ‘Origin,’ he set up a billiard-table, ‘and
I find it does me a deal of good, and drives the horrid species
out of my head.’[256] But his special pleasure in the game line
was backgammon, which he played with Mrs. Darwin, year after year,
keeping a score of victories and defeats, getting or pretending to
be, greatly excited over his failures and even indignant at his
antagonist’s good-fortune. In 1875 he wrote to Asa Gray: ‘Pray give
our very kind remembrances to Mrs. Gray. I know that she likes to
hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now the tally with my
wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490
games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah, 2795 games.’[257]

But through it all Darwin’s humanity is evident everywhere. He loved
his fellow-creatures, loved to mix with them, and to have them care
for him, and his interest went far deeper than a mere, though
absorbing, curiosity as to their animal origin.


II

The drawback to Darwin’s social life, as to his power of work, was in
the limitations of health, and if we would fully appreciate not only
the heroism of his achievement, but the charm of his character, we
must understand how great and far-reaching those limitations were.
The natural strength and vigor of his sturdily constructed frame
endured through youth and in the main through the Beagle voyage,
in spite of the persistent sea-sickness; but from shortly after
his return to England on, his life was nothing but a more or less
relieved and varying chronic invalidism.

The effect of this upon his scientific labors I have indicated
earlier. It hampered them at every step. He could work but a few
hours in the morning and after that the constant effort and lesson
was in the endeavor to forget; ‘It is so weariful, killing the whole
afternoon, after 12 o’clock, doing nothing whatever.’[258] A piece
of investigation, which required perhaps the most nice and constant
watchfulness, had to be abandoned in the middle, because recurring
and increasing symptoms absolutely demanded that complete rest
should be taken. It was necessary not only to stop working, but to
stop thinking, and for a brain eager and absorbed as Darwin’s was,
this was enormously difficult.

With social life the limitation was equally vexatious. It is true
that there are certain compensations about such a state of things. A
successful and prominent man who has his health is expected to meet
all sorts of social demands and strains which consume his time to
little purpose, and if he is not extremely careful of himself and
does not sometimes push insistence even to the point of rudeness, he
finds his work interfered with almost as much as by ill-health, or
it may be even more. There are many times when delicate health is a
convenient and useful excuse, and Darwin recognized this very fully:
‘Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life,
has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.’[259]

But the compensation was not always appreciated. When indigestion
preserved you from boredom, you might be grateful; but when it cut
you off from seeing your best friends, when it deprived you of that
exchange of scientific ideas which is the keenest and most fruitful
stimulus for achievement, then you could not but repine a little.
The excitement, the enthusiasm of eager talk, made you forget
yourself and your symptoms for the time. But there was the inevitable
afterwards, and gradually you learned that restraint was necessary.
‘Even talking of an evening for less than two hours has twice
recently brought on such violent vomiting and trembling that I dread
coming up to London.’[260] Simple comments like this, often repeated,
show how intense and how crippling the weakness was.

What is notable about this matter of Darwin’s ill-health is that
it bred no bitterness. There is an occasional sigh of regret, a
touch of humorous complaint over the deprivations and the inability
to accomplish all that was desired: ‘Adios, my dear Hooker; do
be wise and good, and be careful of your stomach, within which,
as I know full well, lie intellect, conscience, temper, and the
affections.’[261] But there is not one trace of that sour pessimism,
that crabbed outcry against the dispositions of Providence and of the
universe which chronic invalidism is so apt to produce.

When we come to look for the cause of Darwin’s troubles, it is
evident that at this distance of time we can hardly get a clear
enough account of the symptoms and the conditions to conjecture
with great definiteness, though the enlarged medical knowledge of
to-day might interpret matters that were then obscure. There was
sometimes a disposition to attribute the whole recurring misery of
later years to the Beagle sea-sickness. But Darwin himself rejected
this explanation and his son points out that the settled illness came
on only gradually some years after his return.[262] Darwin believed
that his bad health was due ‘to the hereditary fault which came out
as gout in some of the past generations.’[263] The specialists of
that day were quite at sea. ‘Dr. Brinton has been here,’ says Darwin;
‘he does not believe my brain or heart primarily affected, but I have
been so steadily going down hill, I cannot help doubting whether I
can ever crawl a little uphill again.’[264] It is amusing to see how
later speculators have exercised their wits upon the case. Dr. George
M. Gould, in his brilliant ‘Biographic Clinics,’ grouped Darwin
with Huxley, Tennyson, Browning, and a dozen others, as a victim of
eye-strain, and believed all his trouble could have been disposed of
by properly refracting glasses. With the development of glandular
theories, Darwin’s thyroid, pituitary, and adrenal secretions have
been set down as excessive or deficient. With his build, he would
certainly have been a promising subject for the experiments of the
orthopædist, while the dietitian would have prescribed unlimited
spinach and carrots, the osteopath would have discovered disastrous
subluxations in the spine, and the psycho-analyst would see the
foundation of the whole trouble in disordered complexes. And all
of them would have some symptomatic justification, and all of them
would have been eager to work over the poor man, as they have done
over many another such, with mountains of expectation and promise and
outlay, and too often a pitiful mouse of result.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the specialist was not quite so
rampant in Darwin’s day, and while later scientific developments
might, or might not, have cured him, he escaped a good deal of
unprofitable discomfort. The water cure was fashionable at that time
and he was duly put through it, with some annoyance, and perhaps with
a little improvement: ‘One most singular effect of the treatment
is that it induces in most people, and eminently in my case, the
most complete stagnation of mind. I have ceased to think even of
barnacles.’[265]

But pending the discovery of some miraculous cure, the only help
seemed to be in persistent care, self-control, and discipline. It
was necessary to be careful as to eating, and here Darwin appears to
have been generally abstemious, though he had a taste for sweets,
which he sometimes indulged with humorous excuses and a clear
prevision of the bad results that were likely to follow, and did.
As to alcohol, even in his earlier years when boisterous excess in
drinking was common enough, Darwin was not much inclined to anything
of the sort. He does indeed tell of gay supper-parties, where too
much wine was drunk. His son records his confession, in answer to
a query as to early habits, that ‘he was ashamed to say he had
once drunk too much at Cambridge.’[266] And Grant Duff mentions a
curious remark, which seems well vouched for but is hard to believe:
‘Hooker, who is staying here, amused us by saying that Darwin had
told him that he had got drunk three times in early life, and thought
intoxication the greatest of all pleasures.’[267] Whether he thought
so or not, he did not often indulge in it. And as he grew older, he
abandoned wine almost entirely, so that when she was engaged his
future wife could write: ‘I don’t think it of as much consequence
as she does that Charles drinks no wine, but I think it a pleasant
thing.’[268] He smoked cigarettes more or less, and found them
restful, but he certainly did not overdo the habit. His favorite
indulgence was snuff-taking, which was given up and renewed much
after the fashion of Lamb’s tobacco. Of his efforts in this direction
he writes, with humor: ‘I am personally in a state of utmost
confusion also, for my cruel wife has persuaded me to leave off snuff
for a month; and I am most lethargic, stupid, and melancholy in
consequence.’[269]

The chief element in Darwin’s care of his health, however, was
persistent rest. All his days were systematically planned, the few
hours that could be given to it set apart for work, and the rest
devoted to some form of relaxation or needed repose. There were long
nights, if not for sleep, at least for physical tranquillity, and
there were afternoons and evenings spent largely on the sofa, in chat
or in listening to music or to stories of purely diverting quality.
Any interruption of this carefully arranged schedule was avoided, if
possible, and almost always had to be paid for. Thus, by persistent,
systematic, rigid self-control, and by sacrificing days and months
and years to a comparatively tedious indolence, Darwin gained the few
hours that were essential for the work that shook the world.

In one respect he was extremely fortunate. If he was hampered by
ill-health, he at least had ample means to make that ill-health
as tolerable as possible. He did not know the misery of having to
support yourself and your family and being physically unable to do
it. Without wholly endorsing the sarcastic remark of Butler, ‘The
worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next
his health, and the third his reputation,’ one can see some truth
in it, especially when the possession of money serves to make the
loss of health more endurable. Darwin’s father was very successful
financially. He provided for all his children in the most liberal
fashion during his life, and left them in comfortable circumstances
after his death, and Darwin often refers to this with gratitude and
appreciation. The son seems to have had abundant means to keep up a
considerable establishment, to educate and provide for his own large
family, to indulge in general benefaction, and to do if not all he
wished, at least a great deal in the way of scientific investigation
and experiment.

In later years a considerable income from the published books was
naturally added to the supply that was inherited. Darwin was proud of
his earning in this way, and he had reason to be, although he could
hardly boast of such returns as were received by his contemporary
Trollope. One is chiefly impressed, however, with his extreme anxiety
that others should be treated fairly, and that no one should suffer
by his gains. Thus he writes to his publisher, in a tone which
publishers will I think recognize as not usual: ‘You are really too
generous about the, to me, scandalously heavy corrections. Are you
acting fairly towards yourself? Would it not be better at least to
share the £72 8s? I shall be fully satisfied, for I had no business
to send, though quite unintentionally and unexpectedly, such badly
composed MS to the printers.’[270]

One of the consequences of Darwin’s delicate health was, that he was
more or less anxious about money. When you can count on your physical
strength for fighting circumstance, you can float cheerfully out
into the world and let your daily support come where you can get it.
But if you are weak, crippled, and hampered, if you are absolutely
dependent upon the comforts which others merely enjoy but can do
without, you look with dread upon the possibility of losing what
alone assures you of the indispensable. Darwin was not altogether
free from this feeling, and his son tells us that he was haunted
by the fear that his children would not have health to earn their
own living yet might be obliged to do so.[271] In consequence he was
always thoughtful and careful in money matters. He looked after his
investments with shrewd intelligence, and respected the faculty of
making money and keeping it. He was not above saving a penny where
it could be done, and especially he was exact and systematic about
his expenditure. His biographer says that ‘he kept accounts with
great care, classifying them, and balancing at the end of the year
like a merchant. I remember the quick way in which he would reach
out for his account book to enter each check paid, as though he
were in a hurry to get it entered before he had forgotten it.’[272]
An interesting contradiction to this financial exactitude and to
Darwin’s ordinary habits of accuracy is his inveterate carelessness
in not dating or not fully dating his letters.

The financial exactitude and anxiety do not for a moment imply that
he was not liberal and generous in the highest degree, as perhaps the
wisest, and even the largest generosity, comes with such prevision
and forethought. He spent freely on his current living, and he was
particularly considerate, not only in giving to his family, but
in the manner of giving, which sometimes seems to count for even
more. His son speaks of his thoughtful kindness in attending to
financial arrangements, and emphasizes his generosity in paying
college debts, ‘making it almost seem a virtue in me to have told
him of them.’[273] Nor was the generosity confined to his family.
It was broad and luminous in its working, and there are constant
references to the causes to which Darwin sent his check, with no
ostentation, but with the earnest desire to do good. His limitations
of strength made it difficult for him to go about largely in his home
neighborhood, but the poor people knew him and loved him, and he was
ready and glad to assist them when possible. As Bryce says, ‘he was
a kind and helpful neighbor to the humble folk who lived round him
at Down.’[274] Especially he was glad to give not only his time and
his limited strength, but his money, to aiding those who were doing
scientific work of any sort. And in brief, in this connection of
general kindliness it is worth while to note the remark of the devout
old woman who was told that Darwin would go to hell for his wicked
doctrines and answered: ‘God Almighty can’t afford to do without so
good a man.’[194]


III

It was a natural consequence of invalidism that Darwin’s social
habits and inclinations were conspicuous in the domestic circle.
He seems to have been kindly and considerate with every one in the
household, and the servants liked him, though they were sometimes
puzzled by his pursuits, as when a gardener remarked that he thought
Mr. Darwin would be better if he had more to do. It was very rare
that he got out of temper with those who worked for him, and he
dreaded having to scold any one because he knew that he was liable to
say more than he meant.[195] His son tells us, ‘when I overheard a
servant being scolded, and my father speaking angrily, it impressed
me as an appalling circumstance.’[196] In general his manner was
courteous and conciliatory and he appeared more as if he were asking
a favor than giving an order. When he was overcome by illness, in the
very last days, he refused to allow a neighbor’s butler either to
call a cab or to accompany him home, as he was unwilling to give so
much trouble.

Darwin’s extreme love for all domestic animals I have already
indicated negatively in dealing with his dislike of cruelty and
ill-treatment, but the love was always positive and showed itself
in constant interest and attention and care. One instance of
much regretted sin in this regard is amusingly recorded in the
Autobiographical Sketch: ‘Once as a very little boy whilst at the day
school, or before that time, I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy, I
believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power; but the beating
could not have been severe, for the puppy did not howl, of which I
feel sure, as the spot was near the house. This act lay heavily on
my conscience, as is shown by my remembering the exact spot where
the crime was committed.’[107] But the crime was not repeated in
later life. Even to the pigeons, which he raised for purposes of
scientific investigation Darwin became greatly attached: ‘I love them
to that extent,’ he says, ‘that I cannot bear to kill and skeletonize
them.’[108] His dogs were matter of interest and delight and intense
affection to him always. And dogs of all kinds seemed to be drawn to
him. As a young man his sister’s pets would follow him instead of
her, and with the dog of a friend at Cambridge it was the same. Dogs
were not only the subject of his minute observations for the study
of expression, they were his companions in his daily walks and his
intimate friends.

For all the members of his family Darwin’s affection was deep,
solid, and lasting. The tenderness with which he regarded his
father’s memory is, it seems to me, somewhat unusual: ‘I do not think
any one could love a father much more than I did mine, and I do not
believe three or four days ever pass without my still thinking of
him.’[109] The tenderness shows especially in the long sketch of
his father’s character, which is far less qualified with critical
comments than one would expect from Darwin’s naturally analytical
disposition, and always where his affection was concerned the
analysis seemed to drop somewhat into abeyance. His references to his
brothers and sisters also show in simple earnestness how much they
meant in his life.

[Illustration: EMMA DARWIN AT THIRTY-ONE]

Naturally the most prominent figure in the domestic circle is Mrs.
Darwin, and the depth and endurance of Darwin’s affection for her are
everywhere evident. There is no record or intimation of any earlier
attachment or love-affair. Very likely there were such, but neither
Darwin nor his biographers give any hint of them. We have seen that
he liked pretty women in novels, and occasionally in his books he
makes some reference to feminine attraction. His daughter tells us
that ‘He was often in love with the heroines of the many novels
that were read to him, and used always to maintain both in books
and real life that a touch of affectation was necessary to complete
the charm of a pretty woman.’[110] The daughter finds it difficult
to understand what this means, as her father had such a horror of
affectation in general. It seems to me at any rate to mean that he
did not take love-making very seriously, and there is certainly no
sign that it ever much disturbed his life.

Even when he was engaged, his love for Emma Wedgwood does not seem
to have been of the kind that stings and burns. His letters to her
that have been printed are gentle, considerate, and sympathetic: they
exhibit none of the torments that self-doubting and self-spurring and
ardently exultant passion are inclined to. In the most attractive
of them he writes: ‘Excuse this much egotism—I give it you because
I think you will humanize me, and soon teach me there is greater
happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence
and solitude. My own dearest Emma, I earnestly pray, you may
never regret the great, and I will add very good deed, you are
to perform on the Tuesday.’[111] And he adds playfully: ‘I want
practice in ill-treating the female sex—I did not observe Lyell
had any compunction; I hope to harden my conscience in time: few
husbands seem to find it difficult to effect this.’[112] Everything
is right and as it should be. But the tone is not that of some
love-letters I have seen, and this is the more notable, considering
the extraordinary frankness and directness of Darwin’s correspondence
generally.

But if Darwin’s conjugal attachment did not begin with violence and
high-wrought passion, it continued and deepened and strengthened
with broad sunny richness to the end of his life. And this was just
as true, although Mrs. Darwin had no particular affection for his
scientific pursuits. I have said elsewhere that she assisted him,
and in his work as in everything else she was eager to do her wifely
duty and help where she could. But she had no love for the work in
itself, and her daughter remarks that though in the beginning she had
resolved to enter into her husband’s tastes, she found it impossible.
‘He used to tell how during some lecture at the British Association
he said to her, “I am afraid this is very wearisome to you,” to
which she quietly answered, “Not more than all the rest,”’[113]
And in writing to Lubbock he makes gentle fun of her indifference:
‘Of course you will publish an account of [your discovery]. You
will then say whether the insect can fly well through the air. My
wife asked, “How did he find that it stayed four hours under water
without breathing?” I answered at once: “Mrs. Lubbock sat four hours
watching.” I wonder whether I am right.’[114]

But Darwin did not demand that the woman he loved should share all
his professional ardor. He loved her for other things, which he
found in her sufficingly and inexhaustibly, for her patience, her
thoughtfulness, her quick and vivacious sympathy and understanding,
and the general charm of her character. In a passage of his
Autobiography not published till after Mrs. Darwin’s death he said
of her: ‘She has been my greatest blessing.... I do not believe she
has ever missed an opportunity of doing a kind action to any one near
her. I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior
in every moral quality, consented to be my wife.’[115] And in the
ardor of indiscriminating affection he adds a note of eulogy which
could not perhaps be justly written by any one of any one: ‘I can
declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word I
would rather have been unsaid.’[116]

Darwin’s constant ill-health gave a peculiar quality of intimate
dependence to his relation to her whose care did most to make the
ill-health tolerable, and Darwin’s son bears emphatic witness to the
unfailing devotion, thoughtfulness, and efficacy of that care. ‘For
all the latter years of his life she never left him for a night; and
her days were so planned that all his resting hours might be shared
with her.’[117] Only those who have known the situation can fully
appreciate the restraint and constraint involved in such chronic
invalidism, not only for the one who bears, but perhaps still more
for the one who must watch, and sympathize, and shield, and protect,
and as far as possible keep off the pressure and strain of the
crowding, noisy, bustling, indifferent world.

It is true that Mrs. Darwin was spared some of the more trying
elements of such invalidism. It too often carries with it impatience,
irritability, ill-temper, complaint, or at any rate a moody
depression which refuses to be comforted or dissipated. We have seen
that Darwin confessed to some quickness of temper in youth, but there
appears to have been no sign of it whatever during the years of
illness. He was not only gentle and considerate, he was almost always
cheerful, even gay, and relished having love and cheerfulness and
gayety about him. As Mrs. Darwin charmingly puts it: ‘It is a great
happiness to me when Charles is most unwell that he continues just as
sociable as ever, and is not like the rest of the Darwins, who will
not say how they really are; but he always tells me how he feels and
never wants to be alone, but continues just as warmly affectionate
as ever, so that I feel I am a comfort to him.’[118] Nor is there
any sign of growing selfishness. An invalid must in a measure
protect himself, he must make certain demands, and in many cases
these necessary demands tend to grow into the inconsiderate and the
morbidly engrossing. It does not seem to have been so with Darwin. He
thought of others before himself, and kept his own needs and his own
discomforts as much in the background as possible.

Nevertheless, he was an invalid, and his wife was well and vigorous,
and could have mingled largely and freely with the world, and would
doubtless have enjoyed it. Instead, she gave her life to him, and he
fully appreciated the beauty and the constancy of her devotion. As
his son says: ‘In her presence he found his happiness, and through
her his life—which might have been overshadowed by gloom—became one
of content and quiet gladness.’[119] But I think I feel most the
human depth of the broken notes which Mrs. Darwin herself entered,
recording the very last hours and words of her husband’s life: ‘I
will only put down his words afterwards—“I am not the least afraid
of death.” “Remember what a good wife you have been to me.” “Tell all
my children to remember how good they have been to me.” After the
worst of the distress he said, “I was so sorry for you, but I could
not help you.” Then, “I am glad of it,” when told I was lying down.
“Don’t call her; I don’t want her.” Said often, “It’s almost worth
while to be sick to be nursed by you.”’[120]

In his relations with his children Darwin is quite as winning as in
that with his wife. He had a huge household of them, ten in all, boys
and girls. His home-keeping habits brought him closely into contact
with them, and he loved them, and they loved him. It is true that he
appreciates the conflict of family cares with the one all-absorbing
pursuit of life, appreciates it and states it with almost tragic
force and compactness: ‘Children are one’s greatest happiness, but
often and often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to
have none—perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in
this wide world worth caring for, and a man might (whether he could
is another question) work away like a Trojan.’[121] With which it is
interesting to compare the similar complaint of an equally devoted
father, Thomas Moore: ‘My anxiety about these children almost
embitters all my enjoyment of them.’[122]

But the anxiety arose simply from an excess of thought and care and
fondness, and assuredly few fathers have been more devoted than
Darwin was. There is no sign whatever that he was severe or harsh
in his discipline. His son says that he never spoke an angry word
to one of his children in his life. Yet he somehow managed to get
things done as he wished: ‘I am certain that it never entered our
heads to disobey him.’[123] The ease and comradeship with which he
worked appear in one anecdote told by Francis: ‘He came into the
drawing-room and found Leonard dancing about on the sofa, which was
forbidden, for the sake of the springs, and said, “Oh, Lenny, Lenny,
that’s against all rules,” and received for answer, “Then, I think
you’d better go out of the room.”’[124] But I do not imagine that
Leonard did any more dancing.

The basis of all discipline was sympathy and understanding, just as
these were the basis of Darwin’s dealings with his fellow-scientists;
and in his respect for his children’s personality and individuality
he seems to have anticipated the ideas of a later age. His daughter
says: ‘Another characteristic of his treatment of his children was
his respect for their liberty, and for their personality.... Our
father and mother would not even wish to know what we were doing or
thinking unless we wished to tell. He always made us feel that we
were each of us creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable
to him, so that whatever there was best in us came out in the
sunshine of his presence.’[125]

We have already seen what care Darwin took at all times in regard
to his childrens’ comfort in money matters. There was the same
solicitude in all their affairs, as to their education, their
conduct, and especially their prospects and their pursuits and
occupations in life. He was always ready with advice and counsel
when they were wanted. But he did not intrude them unduly, and above
all things he did not insist upon their acceptance, or urge that
his opinion and maxims should be made the rule of procedure. How
admirably characteristic is his saying that ‘he hoped none of his
sons would ever believe anything because he said it, unless they were
themselves convinced of its truth.’[126]

It is, it seems to me, merely delightful to feel that through all
this interest and affection Darwin was constantly using his children,
as he used himself, and everybody else, as material for the abstract
scientific observation which was the main interest of his life.
‘My first child was born on December 27th, 1839,’ he tells us, ‘and
I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various
expressions which he exhibited.’[217] How many fathers would have
done as much? And the constant, watchful observation was continued at
all times.

But it did not in the least interfere with the abundant, overflowing,
sympathetic affection. And the affection was not distant, of the
sort which adores but cannot enter in. His son indeed points out
that health prevented his father’s romping with the children or
taking part in any rough play. But he shared their games, so far
as he could, with eager interest and keen enjoyment, and made them
feel that he was one of themselves and as themselves. When they all
went off on a holiday, he entered into it with a youthfulness of
enthusiasm which intensified the enthusiasm of everybody. He liked
to have the children about, even if they interrupted his work, as
they too frequently did; such a multitude of them in a house would be
likely to. Especially when they were ill, his sympathetic care and
watchfulness were soothing and comforting. His daughter quotes one of
his cousins as a witness that ‘in our house the only place where you
might be sure of not meeting a child, was the nursery. Many a time,
even during my father’s working hours, was a sick child tucked up on
his sofa, to be quiet, and safe, and soothed by his presence.’[218]

Dread of the children’s illness and death at times haunted and
oppressed him. Thus he writes to Hooker: ‘To the day of my death I
shall never forget all the sickening fear about the other children,
after our poor little baby died.’[219] And the depth of his grief
after losing his little daughter Annie appears quietly but profoundly
in the letters written at that time.

As years passed, Darwin’s relation to his children reached its climax
of comradeship in the constant assistance they gave him in his work.
His daughter helped him clerically, and his sons, who had scientific
interests of their own, participated actively and most profitably in
his labors. Sometimes he made use of their keen wits to sharpen and
clarify his: ‘Two of my grown-up children who are acute reasoners
have two or three times at intervals tried to prove me wrong; and
when your letter came they had another try, but ended by coming back
to my side.’[220] Whatever the nature of the assistance might be,
Darwin was always profoundly grateful for it, and his children speak
particularly of the simple, humble fashion in which his gratitude
was expressed. It was a pleasure to help him in any way, because you
were sure that the help would be used as you meant it and would be
thoroughly appreciated.

And in general I do not know that the beauty of Darwin’s relation
to his children can be better expressed than in the words of his
son, equally honorable to son and to father: ‘I do not think his
exaggerated sense of our good qualities, intellectual or moral,
made us conceited, as might perhaps have been expected, but rather
more humble and grateful to him. The reason being no doubt that the
influence of his character, of his sincerity and greatness of nature,
had a much deeper and more lasting effect than any small exaltation
which his praises or admiration may have caused to our vanity.’[221]


IV

Though Darwin’s social activity was necessarily restricted by his
ill-health, his devotion to special friends was as sweet and notable
as his devotion to his family. Indeed, friendship, the natural
turning to sympathetic spirits, and clinging to them with constant
loyalty, seems to have been a peculiarly profound and powerful
instinct in him. He took a deep interest in all his friends’ affairs,
and poured out all his own interests to them with intimate and
appealing effusiveness. In writing of his grandfather, he says:
‘There is, perhaps, no safer test of a man’s real character than
that of his long continued friendship with good and able men.’[222]
Assuredly, if the test is applied to himself, he bears it nobly.

Of his longing for friendship and great aptness for it in boyhood he
speaks very positively: ‘I had many friends amongst the schoolboys,
whom I loved dearly, and I think that my disposition was then very
affectionate.’[223] His son says that the friendships of mature life
had not quite the zest and passion of those of youth; but the son
adds with justice that no one who reads his father’s letters can feel
that his later affections were lacking in intensity or depth.[224]

There can be no doubt that Darwin’s influence over his friends was
very great, probably all the more so because he was so unassertive
and disinclined to interfere or to dictate. Sir John Lubbock is
said to have ‘owed to the great Charles Darwin even a larger debt
in the respect of character formation than in the encouragement
and direction of his mental gifts.’[225] Darwin did not hesitate to
advise urgently and warmly, where he felt that advice was needed. For
example, he writes to Hooker about his health: ‘Take warning by me,
and do not work too hard. For God’s sake, think of this.’[226] He did
not hesitate to differ, or to question, or to argue, when he thought
his friends were wrong, and he could set them right.

At the same time, owing to his humility and natural self-effacement,
the chief impression one gets from the intimate personal
correspondence is that of turning to friends for counsel,
encouragement, and support. Not that he was not amply able and ready
to stand on his own feet; but to develop his views and arguments
to others seemed to clarify them and to give them added force and
significance for himself: ‘I will write no more, which is a great
virtue in me; for it is to me a very great pleasure telling you
everything I do.’[227] Honor, commendation, appreciation, when they
came from the public, were all very well; but their value and their
charm were doubled when they came from those one loved. Thus, he
writes in regard to a letter of Hooker, congratulating him on the
receipt of a medal: ‘I then opened yours, and such is the effect
of warmth, friendship, and kindness from one that is loved, that
the very same fact, told as you told it, made me glow with pleasure
till my very heart throbbed.’[228] I have already alluded to his
expressions of gratitude and appreciation for all the support and
assistance that his friends gave him; but the expression is so
tender, and so constant, and so thoroughly characteristic, that it
cannot be too much insisted upon.

Nor was Darwin’s affection for his friends lacking in the practical
side any more than in the sentimental. He was ready to give his time
and his strength in their service, though time was so limited and
strength so much needed and so essential. When utter prostration
makes assistance impossible, he reproaches himself bitterly, and
zealously offers to make up the defect. As when he writes to
Hooker: ‘I write now to say that I am uneasy in my conscience about
hesitating to look over your proofs, but I was feeling miserably
unwell and shattered when I wrote. I do not suppose I could be of
hardly any use, but if I could, pray send me any proofs. I should be
(and I fear I was) the most ungrateful man to hesitate to do anything
for you after some fifteen or more years’ help from you.’[229] Or, in
slighter matters, the sacrifice is given a humorous turn, as when
Darwin visits his old friend Sedgwick and allows himself to be put
through the sights of the Museum without protest though he suffers
for the effort for a long time afterwards: ‘Is it not humiliating to
be thus killed by a man of eighty-six, who evidently never dreamed
that he was killing me?’[230]

And if time and strength, so vital and in general miserly hoarded,
were not spared, it is easy to imagine that money was not. Scientists
are not always wealthy, and their researches require ample means
for their prosecution. Scientists wear themselves out in eager
toil and then are too often hard put to it for funds with which to
recuperate. Darwin was always watchful, interested, ready, generous,
and best of all unobtrusive in supplying these needs. If his
closest friend and supporter Huxley broke down, Darwin was quick to
head a subscription to make recovery possible. If he heard that a
fellow-worker in Germany, who was accomplishing great results with
small means, was hampered and embarrassed for lack of books, he
writes at once: ‘Forgive me, but why should you not order through
your brother Hermann, books, etc., to the amount of £100, and I would
send a check to him as soon as I heard the exact amount? This would
be no inconvenience to me; on the contrary, it would be an honor
and lasting pleasure to me to have aided you in your invaluable
scientific work to this small and trifling extent.’[231]

But the merely material relation of support and assistance was a
small affair compared to the profound affection which Darwin seemed
peculiarly calculated to convey and inspire. The note of this
affection sounds through all his correspondence and gives it a more
winning quality than almost anything else. How deep and strong was
his friends’ regard for him is nicely indicated in the passage in
which Huxley analyzes the bearing of it upon his work and success: ‘I
cannot agree with you, again, that the acceptance of Darwin’s views
was in any way influenced by the strong affection entertained for him
by many of his friends. What the affection really did was to lead
those of his friends who had seen good reason for his views to take
much more trouble in his defense and support and to strike out much
harder at his adversary than they would otherwise have done. This is
pardonable, if not justifiable—that which you suggest would to my
mind be neither.’[232]

As for Darwin’s own feeling, I know nothing that brings it home
more vividly, when one considers his zeal for his work and for
success with it, than the passage in which he declares such success
and everything else to be trash beside love: “Talk of fame, honor,
pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection; and this
is a doctrine which, I know, from your letter, that you will agree
with from the bottom of your heart.’[233] After which I think we may
conclude generally that few human beings have been more endowed than
Charles Darwin with tenderness and sympathy for all created things.’




CHAPTER VI

DARWIN: THE DESTROYER


I

In studying the influence of Darwin and Darwinism, it is well to
begin by realizing clearly the crude orthodox religious conceptions
which prevailed with the mass of mankind through the Middle Ages
and well into the nineteenth century, as they prevail still in
some form among large portions of the population in Europe and
America. According to these conceptions the universe was created by
an omnipotent, thoroughly anthropomorphic Deity. In that universe
the terrestrial globe occupied a most important, if not a central
and pivotal position. The globe was peopled by living beings, each
created by the Deity in its particular form and kind, and all,
like the whole existing universe, subordinated to man, who alone
was endowed with a reasoning intellect and a moral nature. Thus
gifted, he was an object of peculiar solicitude to his Creator, who
interfered in every aspect of human fate, and whose favor could be
secured and his wrath deprecated by prayer and by the conformity of
human conduct to the divine decrees. In other words, the earth was
the primary object of the universe, and man was the primary object of
the earth, and hence of the universe also.

The speculations of Copernicus and the consequent development
in modern astronomy, showing that the earth was not the center
of the universe at all, but merely an insignificant and utterly
inconsequential speck in the vastness of stellar space, gave this
orthodox view a shattering shock. If the earth was of no consequence,
how could man’s consequence be supreme? Theology, with its fortunate
gift of agile adaptation, after first combating the new astronomy
with all its zeal, finally worked out to a belated acceptance of
what could not be resisted, and then ingeniously contrived, by huge
effort of reasoning, to reconcile science with orthodox views and to
restore man to his supremacy. But just when this had been happily
and satisfactorily accomplished, along came Darwin, and shattered
human distinction and superiority, and with them the ancient ideas
of Deity, even more completely than Copernicus had done. It is no
wonder that theology, exhausted by the earlier struggle, was at times
inclined to balk and give up the contest.

What interests us first is Darwin’s own attitude toward the
far-reaching consequences of his theory. In an earlier chapter we
have considered his religious views, so far as they affected him
personally. We are now concerned with the larger aspect of their
effect upon mankind as a whole.

That he was conscious of possible effects from the start is evident.
He had lived closely enough in contact with the orthodox attitude
to appreciate the results of disturbing it, and the deeper results
of disturbing the fundamental principles upon which it was based.
Nevertheless, he does not appear to have felt, or at least to have
been haunted by, the dread of a solitary and God-abandoned universe
that afflicts some of us. He was sensitive to concrete fears: ‘You
will then get rest, and I do hope some lull in anxiety and fear.
Nothing is so dreadful in this life as fear; it still sickens me
when I cannot help remembering some of the many illnesses our
children have endured.’[154] But his general mental attitude was so
healthy and so practical that he was not too much troubled by remote
apprehensions and dim spiritual possibilities. Thus he was inclined
to take an optimistic view of the workings of natural selection.
He believed that, on the whole, the sum of happiness exceeded that
of misery for sentient beings,[155] and he felt that indefinite
progress and advancement for man were perfectly compatible with
the conclusions to which his scientific study led him. As he puts
it in ‘The Descent of Man’: ‘To believe that man was aboriginally
civilized and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions,
is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently
a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more
general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and
interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as
yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion.’[156] With
these undeniably optimistic leanings on Darwin’s part in mind, it is
amusing to read Lyell’s remark, that ‘he had frequently been asked
if Darwin was not one of the most unhappy of men, it being suggested
that his outrage upon public opinion should have filled him with
remorse.’[157]

At the same time, Darwin was perfectly aware that his theories tended
to shatter the orthodox view of man and his supremacy and even the
orthodox God. The sheer, simple statement of the matter appears in
one vivid phrase: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on
the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of
nature!’[158] Especially Darwin knew well what fierce hostility he
should evoke from those who had grown up in the orthodox belief,
were wedded to it by all the force of habit and tradition, and
were intellectually unqualified to adapt themselves to any other.
Therefore, from the beginning, he proceeded with the greatest caution
and moderation of statement. This arose partly from his sweetness of
temper. He had no desire to wound or destroy, except as the truth
might compel him to do so. One early critic speaks admirably of
‘the magnanimous simplicity of character which in rising above all
petty and personal feeling delivered a thought-reversing doctrine to
mankind with as little disturbance as possible of the deeply rooted
sentiments of the age.’[159]

It was this caution and considerateness that induced him to write
such passages as the conclusion of the ‘Origin’ with its interesting
introduction for later editions of the phrase ‘by the Creator’ in
the last sentence.[160] And the caution did not result wholly from
timidity or unwillingness to shock, but was also brought about by
Darwin’s natural reluctance to commit himself in regions where he did
not feel at home, or to take one step beyond the properly scientific
province which he had really made his own. As to ultimate questions
he confessed himself to be in ‘a muddle,’[161] and why should he
interfere with the more definite creed of others?

On the other hand, where his conclusions were clear and well
established, he meant to speak out, and let the truth prevail,
without regard to the feelings of anybody. He wanted to sustain no
cause, to push no argument for itself, he wanted facts and nothing
else. And when he feels that he has yielded too much to popular
prejudice and to the desire to conciliate it, his regret is decided
and he determines to do so no more: ‘I have long regretted that
I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of
creation, by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown
process. It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of
life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.’[162]

As regards this world, in questions of morals, of conduct, and
generally of the bearing of evolution on sociology, Darwin’s own
sturdy moral habit and self-poised temperament made him perhaps
unduly optimistic. Temptation had little hold upon him. Why should
it have more upon others, even unsustained by celestial guidance and
control? In ‘The Descent of Man’ he endeavors to show the social
instinct as a sufficient and satisfactory basis for upright living:
‘We have seen that even at an early period in the history of man, the
expressed wishes of the community will have naturally influenced to
a large extent the conduct of each member.... Thus the reproach is
removed of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in
the base principle of selfishness.’[163] And elsewhere he adds, ‘It
is not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may be
inherited.’[164] Yet the deadly, grinding, destroying implications
of the struggle for existence do crop out everywhere, and the best
intentioned efforts do not altogether disguise them: ‘It may be
difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of
the queen-bee, which urges her to destroy the young queens, her
daughters, as soon as they are born, or to perish herself in the
combat; for undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; and
maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is
most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural
selection.’[165] While Darwin’s optimism as to possible consequences
appears, it seems to me, in a note to the ‘Descent.’ He is commenting
on an article of Miss Cobb, in which she says, referring to his
ethical explanations, ‘I cannot but believe that in the hour of their
triumph would be sounded the knell of the virtue of mankind.’ On
which Darwin remarks comfortably, ‘It is to be hoped that the belief
in the permanence of virtue on this earth is not held by many persons
on so weak a tenure.’[166]

When it comes to the bearing of evolution on another world, Darwin’s
attitude is equally interesting, and equally inconclusive. To me
one of the most characteristic and suggestive sentences he ever
wrote occurs in a letter to Wallace, of August, 1872 (italics mine):
‘Perhaps the mere reiteration of the statements given by Dr. Bastian
and by other men, whose judgment I respect, and who have worked long
on the lower organisms, would suffice to convince me. Here is a fine
confession of intellectual weakness; but _what an inexplicable frame
of mind is that of belief_.’[167] The implications here are almost
fathomless, but it is clear enough that to Darwin belief in general
was not a spiritual necessity of his being, but merely came with the
overwhelming obtrusion of fact.

In regard to a future life, Darwin recognized, in a passage I have
quoted earlier, that a belief in it was needed to complete the
process established here, and the dire necessity of the belief comes
out clearly in the passage suggesting the tragic physical future of
this earth: ‘I quite agree how humiliating the slow progress of man
is, but every one has his own pet horror, and this slow progress ...
sinks in my mind into insignificance compared with the idea or rather
I presume certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing.
To think of the progress of millions of years with every continent
swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with
probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been
again converted into red-hot gas.’[168]

Yet when the question of the future has been debated over and over,
the result, as with other questions, is complete muddle and puzzle,
and all that can be said of them is: ‘The conclusion that I always
come to after thinking of such questions is that they are beyond the
human intellect; and the less one thinks on them, the better.’[169]
What at least stands out, is that Darwin does not greatly concern
himself with the enormous dislocation of life in this world which is
likely to follow the loss of belief in another.

And again, there is evolution and God. Darwin frequently insists
that he is no atheist, and that his system must not be charged with
any atheistical conclusion: ‘Let each man hope and believe what
he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all
necessarily atheistical.’[170] The belief in God is eminently useful:
‘With the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of
an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of
morality.’[171] At every convenient opportunity God is given fair
play and a fighting chance: it rests with Him to make the most of it.
At the same time, the obstacles and difficulties are mountainous and
it would appear insuperable. Thus, there is the conclusion of ‘Plants
and Animals Under Domestication’: ‘If we assume that each particular
variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that
plasticity of organization, which leads to many injurious deviations
of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which
inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence,
to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to
us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and
omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus
we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that
of free will and predestination.’[172]

But the result in any case, if God is left in His universe at all, is
to remove Him very, very far away, and completely to demolish all
sense of His intervention in the little daily actions and experiences
of common life and all intimate communion and conference with Him in
regard to those actions. When ‘The Descent of Man’ is published, Mrs.
Darwin writes to her daughter, quite simply: ‘I think it will be very
interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting
God further off.’[173] For others besides Mrs. Darwin it reduced Him
quite to the vanishing point.

But if Darwin himself was contented to let God alone, so far as
possible, the more ardent and zealous of Darwin’s followers were
inclined to hustle the Creator out of the universe altogether.
This was especially true of the aggressive Darwinians in Germany.
They extended the deductions of evolution to all the practical
workings of human life in a fashion which Darwin distinctly
disapproved: ‘What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany,’ he
writes, ‘on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through
Natural Selection.’[174] To Darwin’s energetic disciple, Weisman,
the evolutionary theory seemed as solidly established as that of
gravitation: ‘We know just as surely as that the earth goes round
the sun, that the living world upon our earth was not created all at
once and in the state in which we know it, but that it has gradually
evolved through what, to our human estimate, seem enormously long
periods of time.’[175] And in Weisman’s opinion, evolution would
go on creating adequate moral ideals, as it has done in the past:
‘The number of those who act in accordance with the ideals of purer,
higher humanity, in whom the care for others and for the whole will
limit care for self, will, it is my belief, increase with time and
lead to higher ethical conceptions, as it has already done within
the period of human existence known to us.’[176] Häckel substituted
an exuberant, triumphant materialistic atheism for the crawling
superstitions of an earlier day.

In England Huxley endeavored to emphasize the complete separation
of religion and science, though no one really knew better than he
how fatally they interlock at every step. Spencer, in providing
evolution with a metaphysical apparatus, extended its bearing into
all the regions of speculative thought. It is not probable that
he is much read at present, but his ‘First Principles’ spread a
wide leaven of agnosticism among the youth of a generation ago,
and I do not know where you will find a more desolating statement
of the possible barrenness of evolutionary results than in the
conclusion of his Autobiography: ‘Then behind these mysteries lies
the all-embracing mystery—whence this universal transformation
which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will
go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? And along with this
rises the paralyzing thought—what if, of all this that is thus
incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension anywhere? No
wonder that men take refuge in authoritative dogma.... Lastly come
the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming
so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such
that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other,
while simultaneously comes the thought, so strange and so difficult
to realize, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of
existence and the consciousness of having existed.’[177]


II

After considering Darwin’s view of the practical working of his
discovery, it is interesting to sum up, so far as is possible in
such vague and indefinite matters, one’s own impression of the
effect of the popular acceptance of that discovery. And here I must
emphasize that I am not dealing with philosophical or scientific
theories, least of all with any such theories of my own, but am
simply trying to suggest what seem to me the indirect and secondary
workings of scientific theory in the minds of vast masses of people,
even of those conventionally connected with the churches of various
denominations. It is hardly necessary to say that Darwin’s own
teaching cannot be held directly responsible for those workings,
and that many of them he would have completely rejected. Moreover,
it must also be recognized that Darwin in large measure summarized
and embodied the general scientific drift of the age. Especially
we must not overlook the immense influence of practical as well as
theoretical science in affecting contemporary life. An excellent
editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature (May 8, 1926)
emphasizes the importance of scientific invention and machinery on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century living, and this importance, both
direct and indirect, is almost incalculable. For example, printing
has spread thought among the masses. The sewing-machine has changed
the world of woman. The extraordinary development of transportation
has enormously increased the superficial bustle and distraction
of life, to the serious detriment of meditative and spiritual
interests. Nevertheless, the evolutionary theory may be regarded
as typifying and formulating all these complicated tendencies more
fully and effectively than any other. How the theory has worked is
well suggested in the pregnant words of Professor Osborn, though
he is careful to insist that it is the misunderstanding, not the
understanding, of evolutionary doctrine, that has caused the evil:
‘It may be said without scientific or religious prejudice that the
world-wide loss of the older religious and Biblical foundation
of morals has been one of the chief causes of human decadence in
conduct, in literature, and in art. This, however, is partly due to a
complete misunderstanding of creative evolution, which is a process
of ascent, not of descent.’[178]

Let us attempt to follow the workings of evolution in various phases
of life and thought. Take, first, politics. We cannot perhaps
establish two strongly opposed points of view in regard to the
phenomena of political life better than by contrasted quotations.
President Coolidge, speaking on October 29, 1926, said: ‘I do not
know any adequate support for our form of government except that
which comes from religion.’[179] Professor Keller, writing of
‘Societal Evolution,’ says: ‘What moves men ... is not thought, but
emotion. And what sets emotion going is interest.... What sets the
revolutions in motion, with the result of drastic selection in the
codes, is not the cerebration of any one over great issues, but the
unendurable discomfort and awakened emotions of the masses. Their
interests have been so outraged that anything seems likely to be
better than the present.’[180]

The great democratic movement of the past hundred and fifty years
naturally far antedated Darwinism. Its roots were laid in the
eighteenth century, with the teachings of the French philosophers,
chiefly Rousseau, and the practical action of the American and French
Revolutions. But the views of evolutionary science fitted admirably
with the intense individualism of democracy, its proclamation of the
right of the individual man to assert himself against every and all
others, high or low, rich or poor.

After democracy has made its way in the world, it is interesting to
see the effort of theology to claim it and to urge that the value and
importance of the individual is a gradual effect and an essential
element of Christian doctrine. It is true that Christianity has
always proclaimed the equality of all souls before God and their
equal need of salvation. But it is equally true that the Church
has always got along comfortably with every sort of tyranny and for
centuries solemnly sponsored the divine right of kings, alleging at
all times the unfailing text, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which
are Cæsar’s.’ And it is more deeply true that the natural Christian
emphasis upon the importance of another world tends to create
indifference to the political concerns of this, so that, even in the
middle of the nineteenth century, revivalists like Moody could regard
political movements and reforms as matters of minor consequence in
face of the imminent cataclysm which would wipe out this world and
its doings altogether. The most vigorous and energetic insistence
on the rights of man as a mortal came from those who concerned
themselves very little with his immortality.

And if indifference to the other world affected politics, it has had
an even greater effect in the more general regions of sociology. So
long as the poor and wretched were taught—by the rich—that their
sojourn here was infinitesimally insignificant compared with the
bliss that awaited them hereafter, they could endure with comparative
patience. Lazarus could let the dogs lick his sores with fair
content, while he was comforted with the reflection that an equally
bad day was coming for Dives, and a great deal more of it. But when
he became convinced that this world was all, Lazarus bestirred
himself, and invented Socialism and Anarchism and Bolshevism and
many other isms with capital letters, which might enable him to
attend to the matter of Dives right here and to see to it that, if he
himself could not share all the blessings of the rich, at least the
rich might be made as miserable as he. We have become so gradually
accustomed to an adjustment to the standpoint of this world that we
hardly realize how completely and vastly it has entered into the
views and opinions of even those who do not explicitly admit it.

Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the
close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a
rôle in the arts that it had never played before and the prominence
of landscape in painting was as notable as natural description in
literature. But during the first half of the nineteenth century this
natural influence was romantic, imaginative, emotional. With the
middle years the scientific tendency made itself felt, and art became
more closely and intensely realistic. This is perhaps most generally
obvious in the literary world, and the great novelists of France
from Balzac on embody the scientific movement of which Darwin is so
eminently representative. Most significant of all in this regard is
the great epic of Zola, the history of the Rougon-Macquart family,
in twenty solid volumes. I am not for a moment vouching for the
solidity of Zola’s science, which may be quite as fantastic in its
way as the romance of Dumas. The point is that Zola believed himself
to be typifying and illustrating scientific tendencies, and that the
popularly accepted notion of the struggle for existence, with all
its blind and bitter cruelty, its pitiful tragedy of the warfare
and merciless destruction of the animal world, was transferred to
humanity in the endless pages, as gloomy as they are powerful, of
the great French imaginative drama. And it is interesting, as we
come right down to the present day, to find a thoughtful critic
attributing the ugly and realistic tendencies of current American
fiction not to any passing upheaval caused by the World-War, but to
just this gradual influence of scientific thought making itself felt
everywhere: ‘What we are looking at is not the product of a decade or
an episode, even so supreme an episode as battle, but the fructifying
of scientific doctrines that for several decades have been seeping
into society. What we are witnessing is the yielding of the romantic
view of life to the scientific.’[181]

Thus scientific conceptions, working in the popular mind, have fixed
it upon the affairs of this world, and have reduced the various
phases of the other, formerly so immensely important, to a shadowy
inconsistency. Science, for example, has disposed of hell with
ludicrous completeness. The old material hell, as Dante and the
Middle Ages viewed it, a repository definitely under ground, with
devils busily engaged over boiling cauldrons, has surely vanished,
never to return. In the scientifically arranged physical universe
there is no place for it. Even my friend Moody, whose ideas of heaven
were so specific, does not attempt any such physical location of
hell. And it is true that the orthodox still take refuge in moral
torments, prolonged if not eternal horrors, which the erring spirit
in wilful perversity inflicts upon itself. But it is doubtful if
even the orthodox continue to take even these very seriously. There
cannot be many persons who still suffer from the brooding gloom with
which the concrete vision of hell genuinely oppressed thousands of
sensitive souls in ages past. And in some respects this may be set
down as a gain, since the misery to the sensitive souls was very
real, while how far the fear of hell acted as a deterrent to souls
of another order is always open to question. But, gain or loss, it
will hardly be disputed that the boiling depths of hell have largely
boiled away.

Unfortunately hell, in departing, has shown a marked tendency to drag
heaven with it. The same material difficulty of course obtains here
also. Moody used to proclaim that heaven was tangible, mapable, a
city like New York, only with more agreeable streets and doubtless
better traffic arrangements. But it is hard for the most devout
believer to-day to take so concrete a view. And it is not only that
the pearly gates and golden pavements have gone. Their disappearance
has given a rude jar to the belief in any kind of future life
whatever. I am merely speaking of the average American man in the
street, and perhaps of even the woman also. The negative views in
such matters announced shortly before his death by so good, so
upright, so in the largest sense Christian a man as Luther Burbank,
are beyond a doubt the views more or less definitely formulated of
millions of men in America to-day. The best they can say is, that
it is their business to live the life here in the most energetic,
straightforward, profitable way they can, to see that after their
deaths their wives and children are provided for, and to leave any
other lives to take care of themselves.

And then there is the question of God, and it seems that He has a
tendency to vanish also, with the disappearance of His celestial
habitation, so that I feel a pathetic touch of tenderness for
departed grandeur in capitalizing the pronoun. The scientific
sequence of cause and effect has permeated so thoroughly the minds
of even those who do not think of it in formal terms that the old
feeling of the intervention of Divine Providence in daily affairs and
the old intimate relation with a personal Father have been greatly
weakened where they have not been altogether forgotten. As Mrs.
Darwin suggests, God grows further and further away. It is sometimes
urged that this remoteness is connected with a deeper and more
serious reverence, that our relation to the immanent Deity has become
more worthily and profoundly spiritual; but there is great danger of
revering Him out of existence. In the Middle Ages men treated God as
familiarly as if He were a friend round the corner, but they felt Him.

Worship, at any rate Protestant worship, tends to lose its devotional
character and the overpowering sense of the Divine presence, and
to become a mere polite fraternizing for social purposes. You hear
many people say that they worship God better alone in the fields
than in the churches. As to some of the churches the feeling is
natural enough, but I wonder how many think of Him on the golf-links,
except in the form of profanity, or in the hurry and swirl of
traffic-crowded highways, or even in the fields, if anybody ever
gets there any more. And prayer? I have spoken in connection with
Darwin of my old friend who prayed, though he had nothing to pray
to. It may be that more keep up the habit than we suppose. But with
how many is it still a passionate intercession for divine help in
their daily needs or a means of self-forgetful communion with the
comforting, supporting, everlasting Arms? How many boys still pray to
have fence-rails lifted off them or to win in their games of baseball
and football? Can we possibly conceive such a state of things as
is indicated in Finney’s description of a revival a hundred years
ago? ‘Indeed the town was full of prayer. Go where you would, you
heard the voice of prayer. Pass along the street and if two or three
Christians happened to be together, they were praying. Wherever they
met, they prayed.’[182]

The most striking of all the dislocations effected by the intrusion
of the scientific attitude is in the banishment of sin. Not only
original sin has been swept away with the disappearance of the
older theology and the establishment of evolutionary doctrines, but
the uneasy, haunting torment of conscience and remorse appears to
have been greatly diminished. No doubt it still, as always, chiefly
harasses those who have least need of it. No doubt some persons
still vex themselves to agony for imaginary sins. But vast numbers,
especially of the younger generation, are like the heroine of
Lemâitre’s play, ‘a little woman who without any very definite idea
of the meaning of positivism, Darwinism, struggle for life, etc.,
lives in a moral atmosphere impregnated with all these things.’[183]
And as a consequence, her moral attitude undergoes the great
transformation of the modern world, by which an old-fashioned sin
becomes simply a new-fashioned mistake. In other words, expediency,
the belief that it does not pay to do wrong, takes the place of the
old divine sanction, divine command, divine reward and punishment.

There are many who take a very sanguine view of all this. To them
it seems that the old, instinctive sense of sin was stupid and
caused far more misery than it cured. Expediency, or enlightened
self-interest, working with the larger interest of the community,
is expected more and more effectively and satisfactorily to take
the place of the older categorical imperative. But to others it
seems that expediency is but a chill and slender reed to lean upon
when the stress of passion and temptation comes. ‘Oaths,’ says
Shakespeare, ‘are straw to the fire i’ the blood.’ The dread of
hell was often a mild deterrent enough, but it is doubtful whether
remote considerations of expediency will suffice to deter even so
effectively as hell-fire.

To these old-fashioned and conservative persons it seems likely
that the decay of a divine origin will weaken and break down the
springs of moral action and that in an enlightened self-interest the
enlightenment is hardly powerful enough to abolish the selfishness.
Some of these persons have even been disposed to see in the World
War something at least of the culmination of evolutionary doctrines
about the struggle for life and survival of the fittest, and it
is certainly in the protest against these doctrines that the
Fundamentalists find their best justification for attempting to set
back and repress the movement of human thought, if there were any
justification whatever for the unwisdom of an effort to dam the
Mississippi with a sheet of paper.


III

When we turn from the popular acceptance of evolution and its
workings, we may, if we choose, find plenty of interpretations of the
theorists yielding a different result.

Long before Darwin’s day evolution, in the sense of a larger process
of development and unfolding in the universe, had been foreshadowed
and cherished by the philosophers. Not to speak of the Greeks,
the successors of Kant in Germany had, each in his way, devised
some dynamic explanation of the spiritual world. Fichte had built
his mystical metaphysic of the ego, Schelling had worked out his
scheme of the adjustment of the I and the Not-I, Hegel had erected
his superb logical edifice on the framework of thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis, starting with the elements of being and non-being
reconciled in the progressive thesis of becoming, which in itself
seems to have the germ of the whole evolutionary development.
Schopenhauer and Hartmann had followed somewhat similar lines in
their pessimistic treatment of the Will and the Unconscious. So
again, the thinking of our own Emerson not only anticipates Darwin
in such detail as the lines I have already quoted,

‘And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of
form,’

but is eminently suggestive of evolution in the intensely dynamic,
developmental quality of his thought, which perhaps also, in its
suggestion of a Pantheistic indifference to immortality, may be said
to be as destructive to humbler human hopes as Darwin was.

Also, there are the philosophers who, obviously coming within the
scope of evolution and Darwinism, transform and transfigure them with
a certain divine radiance and spiritual change. There is William
James. Forty years ago I happened to ride in a horse-car opposite
James, who was talking with all his splendid, eager enthusiasm to
a pupil sitting beside him. James said that for a time he had been
oppressed by the gloom of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Then he had
pulled himself together and made up his mind that the true course
for him was to get rid of all the evil within his own reach, so far
as he personally could, and let the broader working of the universe
take care of itself. Here we see the germ which later grew into the
splendid fabric of Pragmatism, the belief that the Spirit, which
made the world of evolving phenomena, was itself a thing of dynamic
growth and force, able to create by its own native energy a future
and a reality and a God that should embody its highest ideals. A
parallel development appears in the ‘Creative Evolution’ of Bergson,
the theory of the creative spirit perpetually evolving in richer,
more splendid, more satisfying forms, through the eternal depths
of a luminous future. From the day when Darwin’s views were first
announced up to this very moment, up to the publication of such books
as Professor Whitehead’s ‘Science and Modern Thought’ and Professor
Lloyd Morgan’s ‘Emergent Evolution,’ thinkers have been busily at
work devising interpretations and developments of the evolutionary
doctrine, regardless of conflict and divergence, in the spirit of
Professor Whitehead’s admirable saying, ‘A clash of doctrines is
not a disaster—it is an opportunity.’ The results are somewhat
bewildering, and perhaps rarely satisfying to any but the thinkers
themselves, but they are at least stimulating and suggestive.

And there are the achievements of the clergy. As I have earlier
pointed out, it took many generations of herculean effort to get
the Bible and the Copernican theory into harmony, but by endless
processes of the reasonable wriggling which so much amused Darwin in
himself and others[184] the two were contentedly brought together.
Then appeared this later disturber of the peace, and at first the
theologians despaired. But when did a theologian ever quite despair?
Mankind must have God, must have Christ, must have the Bible, and
above all things must have a priesthood. If Darwinism did away with
the first three, I ask you what would the priesthood do for a living?
Therefore the contending elements must be reconciled, and should be.
Science in contradiction with religion? Fie! Never! Why, science only
clarifies religion, and religion enriches and fructifies science.
The marriage of the two is triumphantly proclaimed in the joyous cry
of Dr. Cadman, which typifies thousands of others, and demonstrates
that everything is for the best in the best of all possible clerical
worlds: ‘So far from evolution being incompatible with religion, it
is of all scientific theories the most easily accommodated to the
demands of faith. In itself the evolutionary hypothesis supplies
to all scientists and believers in religion one of the noblest
conceptions of the creative mind to be found anywhere in literature.
The idea of progressive development culminating in perfectibility
contains the most radiant optimism extant to-day.’[185] It would be
difficult to improve upon the splendor of that passage, but it offers
vast food for meditation. Somehow I turn from it instinctively to the
comment of Darwin upon one of his orthodox admirers: ‘How funny men’s
minds are! He says he is chiefly converted because my books make the
Birth of Christ, Redemption by Grace, etc., plain to him!’[186] How
funny men’s minds are!

And then there come along those pestilent Fundamentalists, with
whom some of us are much inclined to sympathize, and declare that
Darwinism shatters the Bible and Christ altogether. But the Bible, as
they read it, is infallible. Therefore Darwinism must be wrong: let
us crush it, and grind it, and stamp it out of the world.

The optimism of the scientists is quite as persistent and perhaps
a little more convincing than that of the theologians. There are
first those whom, without meaning any slur, one may call the
pseudo-scientists, writers who have had no special scientific
training or experience or discipline, but who apply their quick
literary wit to the consideration of evolutionary problems as of many
others. If Messrs. Butler and Shaw and Wells and the rest cannot be
said to have made scientific contributions of very great value, they
have at least applied thoughtful, acute, suggestive analysis and
stimulating conjecture in both religious and sociological lines.

The optimism of trained and professed scientists is, however,
somewhat more serious and more important. From the advent of
Darwin’s theory there have been those, like Asa Gray, who persisted
in regarding it as perfectly, luminously compatible with entire
orthodoxy. Gray himself maintained this position with militant
energy, and Mivart, though far more critical of Darwin, contrived to
reconcile the general principles of evolution with a long adherence
to the Catholic Church. In our day Sir Oliver Lodge has reconciled
a life of scientific research with spiritualistic beliefs, and even
Darwin’s co-discoverer, Wallace, ardently advocated spiritualism to
the end.

Others who are not quite so extreme in their conclusions, yet insist
that there is no conflict whatever between a firm belief in Darwinism
and a spiritual hope. Especially scientists of this type lay stress
upon the benefits which enlightened scientific theory confers upon
our life in this world. Evolution, according to them, teaches
the splendid progress of man in the past and in the future, his
enriching development, his enlarging solidarity in well-being and
well-doing. When one reads these almost ecstatic interpretations of
scientific possibility, one finds it really difficult to resist their
rapture. Listen to the enthusiasm of Professor Conklin: ‘The past and
present tendencies of evolution justify the highest hopes for the
future and inspire faith in the final culmination of this great law in

“One far-off divine event Toward which the whole creation
moves.”’[187]

The religion of the future is to be no worse than that of the past:
who knows but it may be infinitely better? ‘In the past religion has
dealt to a large extent with the individual and his relation to God;
its chief concern was the salvation of individual souls and their
preparation for a future life; it has been largely _egocentric_. The
religion of the future must more and more deal with the salvation of
society; it must be _ethnocentric_.’[188] In the charming words of
Meilhac and Halévy:

‘C’est imprévu, mais c’est moral. Ainsi finit la comédie.’[189]

‘Unexpectedly moral at that, It closes the comedy pat.’

To be sure, there are persons to whom all this ecstasy seems more
gorgeous than substantial. I cannot help thinking of the bitter
comment of Leopardi on the sciolists who were busily engaged in
making a happy whole out of wretched component parts: ‘The lofty
spirits of my day found out a new and almost divine scheme: not being
able to make any one person happy, they forgot individuals and set
themselves to making the community happy as a whole.’[190] And he
concludes,

‘I know not whether to pity or to smile.’[191]

I confess that I am myself perfectly, enormously egocentric, and
these _ethno_ considerations appeal to me very little. In so far
as the good of the race is identified with my personal comfort and
well-being, I am interested in it. But my ego cries out for God
simply for itself, and if it is to vanish like a dewdrop in the sun,
words cannot express my utter indifference to the well-being of the
race, of the world, and of the universe.

Nevertheless, it is probable that humanity will achieve some
adjustment in this matter. Mankind has always demanded spiritual
ideals and the divine presence, and always will demand them. If
they are lost, it will re-invent them. If they are destroyed, it
will re-create them. No doubt the speculations of the philosophers,
the merry doings of the clergy, and the persistent optimism of the
scientists will suffice to keep religion and the human soul and even
God upon Their feet and to enable Them to carry on decorously through
the dreamy flight of centuries to come.


IV

Meantime, it is interesting to consider how many of the great spirits
of the last generation, and especially of those most intellectually
influential, were profoundly moved by Darwinism and felt more or
less its haunting gloom of destruction and its far-reaching effect.
In Ibsen the struggle for existence shows itself in the intense
assertion of the individual and his passionate emphasis of the right
to live and develop himself, and the same tendency in Nietzsche grew
into the cloudy and colossal phantom of the Superman. With Tolstoi
the obsession of Darwinistic conflict and survival appears in the
earlier novels, ‘Anna’ and ‘War and Peace,’ but in the end, like Zola
or John Fiske, he found the pressure too great and too horrible, and
endeavored to establish an antidote for human misery in human love.
In Renan the subtle, delicate, enchanting irony serves only to make
the fundamental, dissolving nihilism more deep and ruinous. As he
expressed it, through the dramatic characters who are merely his
mouthpiece: ‘Uncertain as we are about human destiny, the wisest
course is to see to it that in making all sorts of hypotheses, one
at least avoids being too absurd’;[192] again: ‘Though the universe
should prove not serious, science might be serious still. Vast sums
of virtue have been expended on chimæras. It is better to take the
more virtuous course, even though one may not be sure that virtue
is more than a word.’[193] Or our own American Henry Adams asks
evolution to educate him, and asks in vain. All it can teach him is
that _terebratula_ can remain unchanged in its insignificance for
centuries, while man evolves, yet in the end proves to be no whit
more significant than _terebratula_. And Adams goes out, like a spent
torch, uneducated, in the huge, unmeaning, whirling acceleration of
theories and discoveries and plain sufferings and questions that must
remain forever unanswered. Yet perhaps Adams was quite as adequate to
the universe as Dr. Cadman.

There are, especially, two figures, not so important for the quality
of their thought, but immensely important for the influence of it,
who stand out as being overweighted and overcome by the evolutionary
blight. Anatole France, following Renan, filled his books and his
life with gentle, indulgent, kindly tolerance, with rare human
insight and sympathy. Yet beneath it all, beneath the lenient
tenderness of Sylvestre Bonnard, and the kindly curiosity of Jérôme
Coignard, and the patient comprehension of Monsieur Bergeret,
always there was the sense of the nullity of human effort and the
futility of human fate. All the motives and interests of men and
women are reduced to the Darwinian residuum of self-preservation
and propagation, or as France repeatedly puts it, more boldly and
baldly, love and hunger are the two poles of our being. And when he
makes intimate confession of the workings of the theory in his own
person and life, this is the result: ‘It is said, “Man is the lord
of creation.” Man is the lord of suffering, my friend. There is no
clearer proof of the non-existence of God than life.... If you could
read in my soul, you would be terrified.... There is not in all the
universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me happy. I
have never been happy for one day, not for a single hour.’[104]

Or take the case of Mark Twain, far more important for Americans than
Anatole France, because it may safely be said that few if any authors
more influenced and to-day influence the youth of America than the
creator of Huckleberry Finn. Mark, like France, was the kindest,
the gentlest, the most humane of men and writers. His energetic
sympathy and support were given to relieve suffering and oppression
everywhere. But although he was not particularly expert in science
or philosophy, the plague of utter nihilistic disbelief had infected
his soul as completely as that of France, and far more militantly.
The destructive effect of the evolutionary teaching cannot be more
fully displayed than in the arguments which Mark, to save his own
credit, puts into the mouth of Satan in ‘The Mysterious Stranger’:
‘A God ... who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and
invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by
seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other
people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them
all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the
responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing
it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether
divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship
him!’[105]

In conclusion, perhaps one may introduce oneself, not in the least
as connected with all these distinguished persons, but simply as a
type of a great number of average human beings, who live and suffer
and have to fight their way somehow through the blinding mist of
years and tears. When I was sixteen, I read the ‘Origin,’ and I think
the impression it produced has never been obliterated. It is not,
it has never been, the maintenance of any deliberate philosophical
theory. I am too utterly without intellectual training or equipment
even to form such a thing. It is not any aggressive or militant
agnosticism. It is simply a feeling of utter insignificance in face
of the unapprehended processes of nature, such as Leopardi expresses
with bare intensity: ‘Nature in all her workings has other things to
think of than our good or ill.’[106] It is a sense of being aimlessly
adrift in the vast universe of consciousness, among an infinity of
other atoms, all struggling desperately to assert their own existence
at the expense of all the others.

Apparently this sense of struggle among individuals, struggle
everywhere, among theories and beliefs, as well as living creatures,
does not affect every one with the same oppression of distress. There
are natures so healthily constituted that they have the mere joy of
adventure in it, and can go on forever elbowing their way through
the crowd of other nothings with the splendid affirmation of their
individuality in the conflict. If it is a question of theories, they
can say with Professor Whitehead: ‘A clash of doctrines is not a
disaster; it is an opportunity.’ If it is a case of more material
strife, they can disguise it with the ameliorations of the social
instinct, or such substantial optimism as sustained President Eliot
through his ninety years in the view that the joy of life is in
‘contest without conflict.’

More infirm, more frail, more doubting tempers may not take it so.
There is the weary horror of endless multiplicity, sweeping from
eternity to eternity. There is the embodiment of the universe in
one individual, and yet the sense that that individual is more
fragile than the universe itself, the sense that reduces all life
and all one is to a mere shifting maze and complication of fleeting
sensations, held together by the vaguest gauze of memory, and liable
to be scattered and disseminated at any moment by the slightest
shock. No doubt the corrective for such a dissolving terror is to
live intensely in one’s own personality, without thinking of it,
to emphasize every moment _instinctively_ the huge importance of
one’s ego, which if it has its way is at all times adequate to fill
the endless spaces of the universe and crowd out the major stars.
But for some of us such emphasis is difficult to accomplish, and
instead, when one is thoroughly penetrated by the evolutionary
attitude, one is too apt to find oneself more insignificant than
_terebratula_, because one is conscious of one’s own insignificance
and _terebratula_ is not.

And it was Darwin, the gentle, the kindly, the human, who could not
bear the sight of blood, who raged against the cruelty of vivisection
and slavery, who detested suffering in men or animals, it was Darwin
who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked the universe
for me and for millions of others.




CHAPTER VII

DARWIN: THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT


I

Independently of his actual scientific work and discoveries, Darwin
is in so many respects one of the finest types of the scientific
spirit, that it seems natural to conclude a study of him with a
summary of the most important elements of that spirit, its admirable
and broadly valuable qualities and its limitations, as illustrated in
Darwin himself and in others as compared with him.

[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN

About 1854]

The basis and fundamental motive of the scientific spirit is simply
and naturally curiosity, the endless and often merely wayward desire
to know and to find out facts, of all sorts. When the mind begins
to shake itself clear of the immediate, engrossing pressure of mere
subsistence, its first impulse is to learn something about the
surrounding universe and about itself. And this impulse is not solely
for utility, for the immense practical advantage which such knowledge
evidently brings with it. There is the instinct of occupation and
distraction, the effort to escape ennui and idleness and to fill
one’s thoughts with outward diversity that they may not be dragged
and weighed down by one’s own particular cares and troubles. There is
the instinct of emulation, the desire to excel others in knowledge,
if one cannot in wealth, or in success of practical achievement.

These are the motives of the collector, and in a sense the scientist
is a collector of facts, as others collect coins, or stamps, or
china, or old furniture. The impelling motives of curiosity and
excellence are much the same. There are people who gather and assort
clippings from the newspapers, for the mere collecting instinct
of it, gather them on all sorts of subjects, with the scientist’s
obscure impulse to accumulate knowledge even if they do not use it.

We are too apt to associate science exclusively with the study of
nature, and in this way the thought of the scientific spirit is
altogether too much restricted. Its real field is as vast as that
of human interests, and scientific methods and scientific purposes
apply as much to philology, to history, to religion, to the general
movements of human society, as to the curious consideration of
animals and plants and stones and chemical elements.

But if mere curiosity is to become truly scientific, it must be
broadened and deepened into research. That is, the simple collection
of facts must be systematized by a definite object and method.
The mere garnering of one fact and another here and there, though
it often has its great and singular charm, is apt to degenerate
into aimlessness and futility. It must be guided and solidified by
the sense of working toward some particular conclusion which will
give all the facts coherence and significance. In other words,
the relation of the facts must be studied, as well as the facts
themselves, they must be coördinated and subordinated, till their
real depth of meaning is revealed. How nicely does Darwin indicate
the proportionate connection between theory and observation in the
following passage: ‘_Let theory guide your observations_, but till
your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory.
It makes persons doubt your observations.’[127]

Two of the supreme elements of research are completeness and
correctness. It is true that final completeness can rarely be
obtained in this world, but the important thing is to aim at it,
to leave no stone unturned, no nook unsearched, to gather every
possible fact from every possible source, before one allows oneself
to deduce positive conclusions, or conclusions that even approach
positiveness. And besides the completeness, one should test one’s
position from every aspect, to insure its being, so far as possible,
correct. No one but the trained scientific thinker appreciates
thoroughly the vast possibility of error, or is sufficiently aware
how apt error is to intrude its subtle and treacherous working into
the most careful investigations and the most logically buttressed
theories. In one of his immensely suggestive casual phrases Darwin
remarks, ‘The history of error is quite unimportant.’[128] This may
be true enough as regards the abstract progress of science, but
assuredly the history of error is of the highest interest to the
curious student of the human mind.

But neither curiosity nor even the ardor of research will go very
far, unless backed up by a habit of enormous and persistent industry.
It is not the showy spurts that count, the bursts of application for
a few weeks or months. It is the long, assiduous unbroken labor, such
as thousands of scientists are giving in hundreds of laboratories,
without prospect of distinction, without hope of immediate reward,
simply from pure love of the work itself. And this toil is expended
not only on the practical inventions, which are expected to produce
comparatively quick and often astonishing commercial results, but
on pure science, abstract investigation of speculative problems,
which even if solved, will not change the practical conditions of
life in the slightest degree. Although Darwin sometimes questioned
the wisdom of spending so many years on his petty barnacles, he knew
that the work was immensely valuable to him in the pure discipline
of labor. At any rate it taught him a profound and sincere respect
for those who were doing such work steadily, cheerfully, unendingly,
without looking to anything else whatever: ‘He would never allow a
depreciatory remark to pass unchallenged on the poorest class of
scientific workers, provided that their work was honest, and good of
its kind.’[129]

There are times when labor is attractive, when you feel like it and
like nothing else, and are ready to plunge into it with a furious
zeal. There are other times when you are dispirited and discouraged,
when the labor seems worthless and the effort impossible, or when
you have a sheer desire to drop it altogether and go play. Sir
Walter Scott, one of the great workers of the world, tells us that
if any one set him a task to do, even agreeable in itself, the
result immediately was an unbounded desire to do something else. The
real spirit of industry shows in sticking through these periods of
discouragement and distraction, and the worker who accomplishes is he
who does not heed them. It is one of the striking things about Darwin
that he kept up work all his life in this spirit, in spite of all
limitations and obstacles, and as a pure amateur in the best sense
of the word. It is true that he himself points out what a benefit
it was to him not to be professionally tied to any duties: ‘If I
had any regular duties, like you and Hooker, I should do nothing
in science.’[130] But it is also true that few men with plenty of
money, with plenty of temptation to amusement of every sort, would
have stuck to their chosen work with the ardor and also the long,
persistent system, which Darwin kept up to the end.

For patience is as necessary to the true scientist as industry. When
you think you are getting new facts, discoveries that will startle
the world and perhaps affect the practical living of millions, there
is a natural impulse to proclaim them, there is haste, eagerness,
the desire for reward, for recognition, for material success. Or,
there is the fear of anticipation, that some one else may be working
on the same lines, and get in before you, and all your glory will be
taken away. These considerations must be banished altogether. The
slow, deliberate processes of nature must be accepted and awaited.
If it takes years to develop the experiments that will, or that even
may, lead to the desired results, then you must accept the years,
unhurrying, unworrying, with the assurance that the work will be done
in the end and that it makes no difference to the world or to the
future, whether it is done by you or by another.

And with the patience goes caution, the determination not to state
results until you have confirmed them, not to overstate or give
them forms that are misleading. In practical life, the necessity of
acting at once often makes caution a dangerous luxury, and those
who hesitate and debate too long are apt to arrive too late or not
at all. A certain amount of chance and hazard must be taken and
accepted. But the beauty of these larger intellectual realms of
scientific thought is that you can wait calmly till all doubt and
error are eliminated. The lesson of moderation is hard to learn.
The best and the most careful never feel that they have learned it
thoroughly: ‘The subject has begun to interest me to an extraordinary
degree,’ says Darwin; ‘but I must try not to fall into my common
error of being too speculative. But a drunkard might as well say he
would drink a little and not too much.’[131] And elsewhere, after
years had weighted his work with the teachings of experience, he sums
up what seems to him one of the supreme needs of science, if not the
supreme need: ‘Forgive me for suggesting one caution; as Demosthenes
said, “Action, action, action,” was the soul of eloquence, so is
caution almost the soul of science.’[132]

Also, when you are testing so widely and carefully, and making sure
of your foothold before every step you take, you come to realize the
vast possibilities of different points of view. The one thing that
the true scientist dreads is fixity, positiveness. Nature is forever
mobile and flexible, and those who would follow nature and study her
and interpret her must welcome and imitate her flexibility. They must
be at all times ready to recognize the different aspects and phases
of the same fact or group of facts, and willing to accept different
conclusions with the changing and shifting light in which the facts
are viewed. As Professor Whitehead puts it, admirably: ‘Science is
even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe
without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs,
or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.’[133] As I
read in an excellent article in a field of scientific research
very different from Darwin’s, that of philology and the emendation
of classical texts: ‘In emending these passages we should adopt
Pasteur’s method of investigation—exhaust every combination which it
is possible for the mind of man to conceive.’[134]

This impartiality, this breadth of view, this readiness to consider,
if not to accept, all conjectures and all theories, is comparatively
easy, when one is indifferent. If the motive of one’s investigation
is mere curiosity, and one has no doctrine to establish, no thesis to
defend, open-mindedness is facile and natural. But the scientific man
instinctively forms theories, and when once a theory is formed, there
comes the human impulse to maintain it, and to consider only those
arguments and even those facts that will bear one out. As we have
seen, it is here almost more than anywhere that Darwin’s example is
of abiding value. No man could be more attached to a theory than he
was to his. Yet he was determined, so far as human nature is capable
of it, to keep his mind open and not to let his preconceptions color
his observation or his reasoning. Huxley’s statement of the matter
is indisputably correct when he speaks of Darwin’s ‘sagacity, his
untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness always
to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was demonstrably
true.’[135] And Darwin, in another of his simple, striking phrases,
condenses all that open-mindedness means, and the difficulty of it
and the rarity (italics mine): ‘If you argue about the non-acceptance
of Natural Selection, it seems to me a very striking fact that the
Newtonian theory of gravitation, which seems to every one now so
certain and plain, was rejected by a man so extraordinarily able as
Leibnitz. _The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind._’[136]

Finally, among these more impersonal elements of the scientific
spirit, a high place should be accorded to the quality of being
ready to admit one’s ignorance. In this age of universal ignorance,
most people who think are more or less aware of their deficiency,
but as we are naturally more appreciative of our own lack than of
that of others, the first impulse is a desperate effort to conceal
it. Perhaps of all states of mind one of the most hostile to the
scientific spirit and most incompatible with it, is pedantry, and
one of the most essential elements of pedantry is precisely this
disposition to conceal one’s ignorance, to make the most determined
attempt to hide from others the fact that we are as helpless and as
groping and as uncertain as they are. This is apt to be the vice
of the teaching profession, though so many teachers are gloriously
exempt from it. The pedagogue is inclined to think, I believe quite
wrongly, that if he once lets his scholars see that there is anything
he does not know, they will lose confidence in him forever, whereas
nothing establishes their confidence so much as to appreciate his
willingness to enter into their difficulties and to admit that the
difficulties are human and his own.

At any rate, the true man of science begins by admitting the
vastness of the regions that he has not entered and can never enter,
the illimitable fields of knowledge that he has not the time or
the training to explore. And no man was ever more notable in this
admission than Darwin. There is the general recognition of the
limits of human knowledge and human capacity for knowledge: ‘The
more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s
ignorance.’[137] There is the recognition of the hardening of the
mental arteries, so to speak, by which our flexibility is so greatly
impaired and against which we cannot guard enough: ‘nearly all men
past a moderate age, either in actual years or in mind, are, I am
fully convinced, incapable of looking at facts under a new point
of view.’[138] Further, there is not only the sense of general
intellectual impotence, but the admission that, even in one’s own
special line, there is much that one must necessarily miss, much
that must, if not invalidate one’s conclusions, at least render them
dubious and incline one to the extremest modesty in asserting them.
No doubt the peculiar nature of Darwin’s work, which obliged him to
touch upon all sorts of very different scientific fields, accentuated
this modesty of attitude, but no one can question that it was inborn:
‘There are so many valid and weighty arguments against my notions,
that you, or any one, if you wish, on the other side, will easily
persuade yourself that I am wholly in error, and no doubt I am in
part in error, perhaps wholly so, though I cannot see the blindness
of my ways.’[139] When one goes after the truth in that spirit, one
is much more likely to find it, and at any rate to teach the world
valuable lessons, whether one finds it or not.


II

Now to consider the more personal qualities of the scientific spirit,
that is those that affect human relations. Naturally it is not
pretended that all scientific men have these personal qualities, any
more than the qualities already indicated. Men of science are human
like the rest of us, and eminently liable to the weaknesses that
the rest of us have. Sometimes even they seem more liable, perhaps
because the impersonality of their occupation makes the personal
weaknesses stand out. But such weaknesses are obviously not a result
of the scientific spirit, but obtain in spite of it, and its higher
tendency should be to diminish or restrain them.

It is interesting, in this personal and human connection, to see how
the scientific qualities develop into virtues to some extent akin
to the Christian ideal. For example, the recognition and admission
of ignorance, on which we have been insisting, must carry with it,
should carry with it, the eminently Christian virtue of humility.
When you are oppressively aware how little you know, how far your
information is from being adequate and your conclusions from being
final, it is impossible to maintain a spirit of arrogance or
self-assertion. You turn to others for their agreement and support,
in the tone of Goethe’s remark that he felt immensely strengthened
in a conclusion if he found that even one other human being agreed
with him. Or, as Darwin puts it: ‘Though I, of course, believe in
the truth of my own doctrine, I suspect that no belief is vivid
until shared by others.’[140] The truly scientific worker should be
ready to defer to the opinion of his fellow-workers and instantly
to surrender his own when convinced that theirs is based upon wider
observation or more valid arguments.

Closely connected with humility is tolerance, and this virtue also
flows from the admission of ignorance almost as a necessity. If you
appreciate your limitations and that your knowledge is as incomplete
as your deductions are hazardous, you will be at all times ready to
recognize that others may be right and you may be wrong, and you
will have a gentle forbearance toward even what appear to be their
errors. ‘True science necessarily carries tolerance with it,’ says
Voltaire.[141]

To be sure, the mention of Voltaire in connection with tolerance
rather makes one smile, for if he fought for tolerance as for other
things, he fought hard and bitterly, and he was always fighting for
something. And in general it may well be urged that the history of
scientific thought shows anything but tolerance and gentleness.
Indeed it sometimes seems as if scientists were a peculiarly waspish
and petulant generation, apt to fly out, and to fly at, with what to
the ordinary mind hardly appears sufficient excuse. Darwin himself
appreciates this unfortunate tendency, and frequently deplores it:
‘How strange, funny, and disgraceful that nearly all ... our great
men are in quarrels in couplets.’[142]

But here again, it is human nature, in its inborn weakness and
self-satisfaction, that does the quarreling, and the scientific
spirit, taken in itself, certainly tends to quiet and lenify. In one
of his very latest letters Darwin wrote: ‘You have shown how a man
may differ from another in the most decided manner, and yet express
his difference with the most perfect courtesy. Not a few English and
German naturalists might learn a useful lesson from your example; for
the coarse language often used by scientific men towards each other
does no good and only degrades science.’[143] But it is difficult
for humanity to learn, and when it is learned to remember, the
profound truth expressed in the saying of Edmond Scherer in regard to
tolerance: ‘The fundamental dogma of intolerance is that there are
dogmas, that of tolerance is that there are only opinions.’

And tolerance, the mere recognition that others may be right and we
wrong, even as to our most cherished theories, when it is enlightened
by clearness of intelligence and warmed by sympathy, easily passes,
as we have seen with Darwin in an earlier chapter, into that most
delightful of all virtues, or more properly that root of all virtues,
the power and the instinct of putting ourselves in others’ places,
of entering into their lives. It is not quite enough to respect
others’ opinions, or even to defer to them. One should go further,
and endeavor to understand how they arrive at them, and to do this,
one should be ever alive to the vast community of human nature,
and the infinite threads and strands that bind together our hearts
and the hearts of even those who appear most different from us. It
is this power of comprehension, this effort at comprehension, of
others’ point of view, which leads to the wonderful gentleness of
tone that makes a great part of Darwin’s charm: ‘You are mistaken in
thinking that I ever said you were wrong on any point. All that I
meant was that on certain points, and these very doubtful points, I
was inclined to differ from you.’[144] It is evident that in arguing,
in discussing, Darwin always sought to understand his adversary’s
position, and in order to do this, to put himself entirely in his
adversary’s place.

The nature of science in itself tends to foster and encourage
this disposition to enter into the lives of others, because by its
abstract character and its larger aims and interests it inclines to
reduce as much as possible the elements of self, and of self-interest
and self-assertion. Indeed, here again it is curious to see how,
when the pursuit of scientific truth rises to its highest intensity
and white heat of ardor, it brings about a sort of self-abnegation,
which approaches and suggests the mystical self-abandonment of
Christian ecstasy. He shall leave all and follow me, says religion.
And we have seen something of the same spirit in Darwin’s apparently
colder declaration that the man of science should have neither wife
nor child, but a heart of stone, and a brain altogether free for the
vast, abstract researches which make the whole of his life.

There is indeed something almost religious in the passion with which
the true scientist casts aside all personal considerations, often
all considerations of comfort and ease and indolent enjoyment, in
the absorbing effort to attain the pure truth which he is seeking.
With what intensity of delight does one fling an old delusion behind
him. As Darwin puts it: ‘To kill an error is as good a service as,
and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or
fact.’[145] With what rapture does one become aware of the progress
of scientific thought: ‘How grand is the onward rush of science; it
is enough to console us for the many errors which we have committed,
and for our efforts being overlaid and forgotten in the mass of new
facts and new views which are daily turning up.’[146]

It is needless to say that thousands of others besides Darwin are
infected with this rapture, and to quite the same or an even greater
degree. In the dawn of scientific thought we have Lucretius, than
whom none was ever more ardent, exulting in his passionate effort to
dart the beams of intellectual day through the swirling, smothering
mist of error and delusion. Or again, in our own time we have such
excitement as is described by Pasteur, so nearly the correlative of
Darwin in many ways, when he feels himself to be on the brink of
discovery: ‘I was so happy that I was overcome by a nervous trembling
that made it impossible for me to bring my vision again to the
polarizing apparatus.’[147]

So the pursuit of pure truth, and the giving one’s life to the
achievement of it, elevates, and clarifies, and chastens, almost
like the pursuit of virtue, and the two tend even to merge in one
another, as in Goethe’s noble saying: ‘The real love of truth shows
itself in this, that one knows how to find and cherish the good
everywhere.’ Or to conclude with another of Darwin’s sentences, all
the more impressive for its simplicity and restraint: ‘For myself I
would however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I
feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of
something the same nature as the instinct of virtue and our having
such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without
any practical results ever ensuing from them.’[148]


III

It seems to be of interest to consider one or two types of the
scientific spirit in lines quite different from Darwin’s. There
is Sainte-Beuve, to whom I have referred in earlier chapters. The
great French critic was almost exactly contemporary with Darwin,
being born in 1803 and dying in 1870. I do not discover that he
ever mentions Darwin’s books, though he must have known something
of them. In any case, he typifies admirably many of the scientific
methods and qualities, the vast curiosity, the research, the labor,
the patience, the passion for seeing all sides and allowing for all
points of view. Only, he was concerned, not with plants and animals,
not with the material, evolutionary world, but with the subtle phases
and motives and passions and developments of the human spirit. He
studied human life and character with endless curiosity and the
results of his study are embodied in the forty volumes of portraits
and in the seven solid volumes of the History of the Monastery of
Port Royal, one of the most profound and searching investigations of
religious psychology that has ever been made. Sainte-Beuve himself
liked to compare his work with the researches of the more specific
scientists. I have quoted earlier his brief statement: ‘I analyze, I
herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[149] And elsewhere he puts it
more elaborately, ‘It is absolutely as in botany for plants and in
zoology for the species of animals. There is a moral natural history,
with a method (as yet hardly developed), of the natural families of
souls.’[150] And he loved to analyze souls of all sorts, good and
bad, strong and weak, happy and unhappy, to analyze them and compare
them and classify them, and bring out in them the profound common
elements of human nature, under the endless play and diversity of the
superficial differences.

It is peculiarly interesting to watch in Sainte-Beuve, as in Darwin,
the working and the complication of the scientific spirit with
the more personal elements. Sainte-Beuve made much more definite
assertion than Darwin did, of sacrificing and effacing the personal
life for scientific purposes. The Frenchman boasted that he mingled
with all sorts of groups and associated himself with all sorts of
causes and experiences, not from devotion to the things themselves,
but from pure curiosity and from the passion for analyzing the
working of these causes in human minds. He carried this so far that
he was often accused of disloyalty to his friends and of espousing
causes and then deserting them, and he himself handles the defense of
the subjective attitude in such a way as to give some justification
for the charge. His life, his thought, his work, were perfectly
impersonal, he said, and in consequence he was epigrammatically
branded with betraying all truths for the sake of truth.

On the other hand, it is very evident that some personal elements
lingered about him much more than he thought or admitted. His early
ambition, his undying ambition, was to be a poet. As a poet he
failed, at least made no popular or conspicuous success. He saw
the ardent contemporaries and close associates of his youth, Hugo,
Lamartine, Balzac, Sand, Musset, making great popular reputations,
while he was compelled to drag along in comparative shadow; and for
all his boasted impersonality, this to a certain extent embittered
him. The vast comprehension, the high intellectual impartiality,
which distinguish him when he is dealing with the past, fail and
shrink in a measure when he discusses contemporary work, and you
cannot but feel that he is unconsciously hampered and tormented by a
jealousy from which Darwin was wholly and nobly free.

But what marks Sainte-Beuve’s work most of all, as I have elsewhere
emphasized, and what distinguishes him from Darwin and many other
notable scientists, is the extraordinary concreteness of it. He had
of course a vast background of general intellectual training and
experience and of conversance with general thought and principles.
But with this background always instinctively present, he devoted
himself directly to the study of individuals. Only rarely does he
deal in the discussion of theories of any sort, and then his handling
is apt to be so complex and difficult that you feel him to be out of
his element. What fascinates and absorbs him is the endless, close,
minute, sympathetic study of individual men and women, and just
because he is not hampered by theories, has no ends to attain nor
points to prove, the study is endlessly varied, flexible, mobile,
adaptable, and profoundly, inexhaustibly human. The incessant,
fruitful application of scientific method has never been better
exemplified than in Sainte-Beuve’s work.

Or, to take another of the broader types of the scientific spirit,
perhaps one of the noblest and most luminous that has ever existed,
Goethe. Goethe was a half century older than Sainte-Beuve and
Darwin, but he lived well down into their period and the clarity of
nineteenth century scientific thinking could find no better example
than he. His actual scientific work is far from contemptible, and
he to some extent anticipated Darwin as to the possibilities of
metamorphosis in the natural world. His speculations on the theory of
light, in contradiction to those of Newton, show at least the active
and energetic intelligence.

But Goethe’s value to the scientific spirit rests on far broader
grounds than any mere detail of scientific research or experiment.
No one cultivated or practiced more than he the attitude of vast,
unprejudiced curiosity, of eager search and relish for pure truth,
independent of all considerations of party, or consequence, or
practical bearing. It is this spiritual latitude which Matthew
Arnold means when he calls Goethe the greatest poet of his own time
and the greatest critic of all times. The free, broad, ample, mobile
working of the human intelligence has never found a more lucid
exponent than Goethe, and everywhere through his writings there are
passages which will help the lover of truth, while the distilled
essence of his mental attitude is to be found in the collection of
‘Maximen und Reflexionen,’ which gives the kernel of wisdom without
the somewhat otiose Teutonic wrapping of amplification in which
Goethe was often inclined to envelop it.

It is in the highest degree curious, remembering the weaknesses
of Sainte-Beuve to which I have already alluded, to read all his
numerous comments on Goethe, but particularly the following: ‘Goethe
understood everything in the universe—everything except perhaps two
things, the Christian and the hero. There was a weakness here which
belonged to the realm of heart. It seems likely that he considered
Leonidas and Pascal, the latter especially, as _monstrosities_ in
the order of nature.’[151] And Sainte-Beuve prided himself upon
understanding the Christian and the hero both, and it is probable
that he did.

The interesting point in Goethe, and also in less degree in
Sainte-Beuve, as compared with Darwin, is that the full development
of the scientific spirit in both of them did not exercise the same
sort of spiritual blight with which Darwin thought that it affected
him. No human being ever lived who was more susceptible to beauty
than Goethe was, and his passion for pure truth did not prevent his
retaining the highest sense of artistic ecstasy through his whole
long life. With him and with Sainte-Beuve both, it could hardly be
said that thinking came before emotion, for both of them adored the
incomparable beauty of form and the rapture that came with it up to
the very end.

On the other hand, neither Goethe nor Sainte-Beuve is for a moment
to be compared with Darwin in that ineffable sweetness and simple
charm which endeared him to all who came into contact with him and
which breathe everywhere through his letters and even his more formal
scientific works.

One striking feature in Sainte-Beuve is that he recognized fully
the absorbing, engrossing nature of the scientific spirit, yet
appreciated that the pursuit of knowledge does not necessarily bring
happiness. No one has expressed the barren desolation of mortal
life with more acrid bitterness than he. Shakespeare tells us that
ripeness is all. Sainte-Beuve doubts whether it exists. ‘Ripen?’ he
cries. ‘Ripen? We never ripen. We harden in some spots. We rot in
others. We ripen never.’[152] Years bring with them—for him—an utter
indifference to everything and everybody: ‘I have arrived in life at
a complete indifference: provided I do something in the morning, and
go somewhere at night, life has nothing more for me.’[153] And again,
life is nothing but the pricking of one illusion after another, till
one becomes bitterly convinced that no illusion is worth the pains
of being pricked. As he sums it up in a vivid figure: ‘Why I no
longer care for nature, for the country? Why I no longer care to walk
in the little footpath? I know well that the footpath is the same,
but _there is no longer anything on the other side of the hedge_.
In old times there was rarely anything, but always there might be
something.’[91]

It is true that Sainte-Beuve’s melancholy and disgust are closely
connected, as he himself admits, with the gross sexual disorders of
his celibate career, and he speaks of ‘the incurable disgust with
everything which is peculiar to those who have abused the sources
of life.’[92] In his later years he seems to have had no principle
of sexual restraint whatever, and to have indulged as freely in
indiscriminate commercial amours as did Pepys or Aaron Burr, though
he was as much without Burr’s gay oblivion as without Pepys’s
touches of remorse. He proclaims as a cynical creed his method of
seeking wisdom: ‘Like Solomon and like Epicurus, I have made my way
to philosophy through pleasure. It is a better road than traveling
thitherward by logic after Hegel’s or Spinoza’s fashion.’[93] And the
sum of the philosophy was akin to Solomon’s. ‘Sainte-Beuve said to
me,’ records Goncourt, ‘One should make the tour of everything and
believe in nothing. There is nothing real but woman.’[94] Solomon
would hardly have made the exception. The curious thing is that, with
all this abandoned personal license, Sainte-Beuve, in his critical
judgments, preserved the most delicate sensibility as to moral
excellence in sexual lines, as in all others.

When we turn to Goethe, we find perhaps little more regard for sexual
morals than with Sainte-Beuve, but at any rate a temperament far
better poised, and to all appearances charged and glorified with
luminous serenity. Yet with Goethe also the scientific spirit, even
though enriched with the artist’s delight and the artist’s creative
power, could not bring happiness in its train. The sorrows and
sufferings of Werther might perhaps be accredited to the extravagance
of youth. But in extreme old age we hear Goethe proclaiming the
emptiness and misery of life in terms almost as bitter and complete
as those of Sainte-Beuve or of Anatole France. ‘I will say nothing,’
he said to Eckermann, ‘against the course of my existence. But at
bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that
during the whole of my 75 years I have not had four weeks of genuine
well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be
raised up again forever.’[95]

So far as we know, Darwin had no sexual cause of spiritual
disturbance, and his scientific pursuits obviously brought him
interest and delight. But we have seen how much even Darwin
complained that absorption in science stunted and atrophied the
higher sides of the spiritual nature. Work was largely a means
of forgetting life, and when work failed, Down cemetery became
singularly attractive. The pursuit of truth for itself, exciting
and engrossing as it may be, would seem to have something abnormal
and unwholesome about it and Pascal’s consolation for the reedlike
insignificance of man in the thought that he is a ‘thinking reed’
sounds a little chill and comfortless, even with Scherer’s
amplification about the glory of ‘the dream that knows itself to be
a dream, of thought that thinks itself.’ The final emptiness and
futility which at times appear to attach to the profoundest search
for truth have never been more grandly stated than in the words with
which Sainte-Beuve brings his vast history of Port Royal to a close:
‘I have been and I am only an investigator, a sincere observer,
attentive and scrupulous.... I have been after my fashion a man of
truth, so far as I have been able to attain it. But how little is
the best we can attain! How bounded is our vision and how quickly it
reaches its limit! It is like a pale torch lighted for a moment in
the midst of an enormous night. And he who most had it at heart to
know his subject, who had the keenest desire to grasp it, and the
greatest pride in treating it, most feels himself impotent and below
his task, on the day when, seeing it almost completed and the result
obtained, the intoxication of power fails him, the final exhaustion
and the inevitable disgust overwhelm him, and he perceives that
he too is but an illusion the most fleeting on the breast of the
Illusion which is infinite.’[96]


IV

And of course it is not contended that scientific men in general are
unhappy, which would be absurd. On the contrary, it is probable that,
with the infinite variety and solace of their pursuits, they are apt
to be an unusually contented and cheerful class of men. There is the
poignant saying of Voltaire, who was full of the scientific spirit as
of most others: ‘Study consoles for everything.’[97] And Montesquieu
expresses it more generally: ‘I have never had a sorrow which a half
hour of reading would not dissipate,’ and again, with more specific
elaboration: ‘The love of study is almost the sole passion that is
eternal in us; all the others fail as this miserable machine which
sustains them falls more and more into decay.’[98]

Yet for the mass of mankind assuredly the scientific spirit and the
pure pursuit of truth are not enough, and the abstract thought of
them leaves a void which only persistent, concentrated action can
fill up. We are living, moving, acting creatures, and for most of
us knowing, thinking, except as a means to living, is inadequate,
infertile, and essentially provocative of discontent. As Sterne’s
Yorick expresses it, in his homely, pointed fashion: ‘I think the
procreation of children as beneficial to the world as the finding
out the longitude.’[99] ‘I’ll do and I’ll do and I’ll do,’ cries the
witch in ‘Macbeth.’ It is the natural, universal, prevailing cry of
humanity, doing, doing, doing, till the end—and then, what? It skills
not to inquire.

And there is the further point, that not only too much abstract
knowing does not help for doing: it is apt to hinder. Especially, the
scientific virtue of the recognition of ignorance is far from being
a benefit in practical life. The best of doing, the best of action
is undoubtedly instinctive, flows by quick, unapprehended, processes
out of the vast subconscious accumulated storehouse of our being. The
supreme illustration of this is the achievement of the athlete. Watch
the complicated action of the highly skilled baseball-player. A dozen
intricate related movements are accomplished with sure, unfailing
speed, any one of which would be utterly dislocated and thrown out of
adjustment by the slightest attempt to analyze it on the part of the
player, who is usually disinclined to such analysis precisely in the
proportion of his practical skill.

And the same thing obtains to much the same extent in what might
appear to be more intellectual lines of practical action. The
soldier, the man of business, the statesman, all require no doubt
immense and competent detailed knowledge in their particular
professions. But here also too great analysis, a too curious probing
of motives and processes and alternatives and possibilities hurts
rather than helps. The pure thinker is too often apt to cry out
with Goethe’s horror: ‘There is nothing more frightful than active
ignorance.’[100] Yet nine tenths of the work of the world is done,
sometimes efficiently, sometimes haltingly, but done, by active
ignorance, and could not be done otherwise. The thinker, the profound
analyst, debates, hesitates, falters, and too often accomplishes
nothing.

It may be that, not only in the realm of muscular effort, but in all
practical action, the best results are obtained by comparatively
instinctive methods. Yet it is evident that deliberate conscious
reasoning is an important instrument in the work of the man of
affairs. Also, reason, the enchainment of thoughts through elaborate
logical processes, is the chief agent of the scientific spirit. In an
earlier chapter we have analyzed the dangers and betrayals of reason.
But the greatest betrayal of all is when reason turns upon itself
and devotes its brilliant, magnificent powers to self-dissection,
instead of to accomplishment in the practical world. The extreme
illustrations are in such minds as Sénancour, Maine de Biran, Amiel,
men naturally equipped for the performance of great things, but in
whom the force of genius is paralyzed by the perpetual introspective
consideration of the means and methods by which genius operates. As
Amiel expresses it: ‘I also feel at times the mad rage for life, the
desperate impulse to seize happiness, but much more often a complete
prostration and a silent despair. And whence comes this? From doubt
of my own reason, of myself, of men, of life, from doubt which
enervates the will and destroys the powers, which makes one forget
God, forget prayer, forget duty, from unquiet and corrosive doubt,
which renders existence impossible, and makes a ghastly mock of
hope.’[101]

Perhaps reason offers the most curious of all the antinomies or
self-contradictions which arise when one seeks to develop the
physical, mental, and moral nature of man, on an evolutionary
basis, from the fundamental instinct of self-preservation. A lesser
but striking form of this self-contradiction is, for example, the
habit of thrift, which is naturally explained as a tendency of
self-protection, yet in its sordid extremes may work to destroy
life rather than prolong it. Or, again, there are the strange
contradictions involved in the social instinct. As one sees it in
the insects, or in the gregarious grouping of the lower animals, the
self-preservational basis is obvious enough, and with a few wrenches
of excusable ingenuity one may put all human affections and devotions
on the same foundation. Yet in the end one arrives at the astonishing
paradox that the instinct of self-preservation has developed devotion
to others so that a man may be willing to lay down his life for his
friend, or even for those who are not his friends. But the extreme of
all these contradictions, if one accepts the evolutionary development
of reason, is that that marvelous instrument should be produced for
the preservation of the individual and yet that the final working
of it should be to show how utterly insignificant, pitiable, and
unworthy of preservation this very individual is.

Another weakness of the scientific spirit, and the curse of its
passion for truth, is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility
of ever attaining it. In the detail of scientific research this is,
perhaps, not an evil, and difficulty is merely a splendid spur and
stimulus to ever renewed effort and achievement. But when it comes
to profounder and more fundamental matters, the difficulty is more
serious, and if it may be justly said that one wearies of everything
except to understand, one wearies of the failure to understand more
than of anything else. After all, there are but two things that it
is really important to know: oneself and God. And it is precisely
in regard to these that the impossibility of final knowledge most
overwhelms us. In the rugged language of old Ben Jonson: ‘I know no
disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but
of itself.’[102] And a Greek, two thousand years before Ben Jonson,
gave vivid utterance to the same sufficiently obvious idea: ‘Many
things are obscure to man, but the most obscure of all is his own
soul.’[103]

It is precisely in this impossibility of attaining truth in the
ultimate things that the Fundamentalists find their justification for
the attempt to control the search for it. ‘You tell us,’ they say,
‘that everything must yield to the search for truth. You undermine
secure, established morals and traditions in the name of truth. Then
truth slips away from you and in the end you can offer us nothing but
a shadow and a dream. Accepted convention is at least a solid basis
for living. You have nothing solid to offer us, for any purpose,
anywhere.’ And the argument would have some validity, if the
inborn movements of great nature could ever be stopped by laws or
legislatures or Fundamentalists.

But, after all, the value of ignorance, or at least of the knowledge
of ignorance, which goes with the scientific spirit, lies in the
charming qualities that I have indicated earlier in this chapter,
tolerance, patience, humility, gentleness. Only, to produce these
qualities, the recognition of ignorance must not be aggressive,
combative. Fifty years ago such recognition was erected into a
dogmatic religion called Agnosticism, the triumphant, militant
assertion that no man knew anything about the fundamental verities
and no man could, and this dogmatism was even more exasperating than
other dogmatisms, because it purported to be based on an attitude
essentially undogmatic. The true, the fruitful, the profitable
recognition of ignorance is not dogmatic or assertive at all. It
is purely personal, begins and stops with _my_ ignorance only, and
lets _your_ ignorance altogether alone. This is peculiarly true and
important in the age of ignorance in which we live, the age which has
piled up general knowledge with such vast celerity of accumulation
that no individual can pretend to grasp more than a very small
portion of it. And all we can any of us say is, I do not know. You
may know, he may know, especially as he thinks he does, which goes so
vastly far, but I, I, I, alas, do not.

Agnosticism is too violent a word for this purely personal and
infinitely humble ignorance. Scepticism even is too proud a word,
too philosophical a word. Yet scepticism, if used with caution, may
perhaps serve, for want of a better. But there is one thing about
scepticism too often forgotten. Universal doubt surely carries with
it the privilege of universal hope. The professed sceptic is too apt
to be critical and cynical, to use his doubt simply to upset the
certainties of other people, and to rest always in the darker side of
possibility. But if anything may be true, surely the beautiful may be
true, the good, the joyous, the lovable, as well as the gloomy and
despondent.

And if the privilege of scepticism is hope, the essence of it is
questioning and questing. There is a doubt which, in its despair of
ultimate truth, is content to trifle, to beguile the misery of life
with jest and play and momentary diversion. Or there is the doubt
in deeper matters which, as with Darwin, turns to eager, assiduous
investigation of the mere, fascinating detail of the external world.
But there is also a doubt which lives in passionate, perpetual
earnestness and the unfailing, unyielding, indomitable effort to
find out God, being assured that without Him the universe, with all
its splendor and all its endless evolving glory, is nothing, merely
nothing. Such doubt will express itself in words like those of the
modern poet:

‘Day and night I wander widely through the wilderness of thought,
Catching dainty things of fancy most reluctant to be caught. Shining
tangles leading nowhere I persistently unravel, Tread strange paths
of meditation very intricate to travel.

Gleaming bits of quaint desire tempt my steps beyond the decent.
I confound old solid glory with publicity too recent. But my one
unchanged obsession, whereso’er my feet have trod, Is a keen,
enormous, haunting, never-sated thirst for God.’


THE END




BOOKS BY DARWIN, WITH THE ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERRING TO THEM IN
THE NOTES

The American revised edition is referred to, unless otherwise
specified

_A Monograph on the sub-class Cirripedia.—The Balanidæ—The
Verrucidæ._ _Cirripedia._

_The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex._ _Descent._

_The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species._
_Different Forms of Flowers._

_The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable
Kingdom._ _Cross and Self Fertilization._

Krause, Ernst, _Erasmus Darwin_ (translated from the German by W. S.
Dallas, with a preliminary notice by Charles Darwin). _Krause._

_The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals._ _Expression._

_The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms._
_Worms._

_Geological Observations._ _Geological Observations._

_Insectivorous Plants._ _Insectivorous Plants._

_Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the
Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the
World._ _Beagle Journal._

_More Letters of Charles Darwin_, two volumes. _More Letters._

_The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants._ _Climbing Plants._

_The Origin of Species._ _Origin._

_The Power of Movement in Plants._ _Movement in Plants._

_The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_, two
volumes. _Animals and Plants._

_The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by
Insects._ _Orchids._




BOOKS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MOST FREQUENTLY REFERRED TO IN THE
NOTES, WITH THE ABBREVIATIONS USED


Aristotle, _Historia Animalium_, translated by D’Arcy Wentworth
Thompson. _Historia Animalium._

Castle, W. E., _Genetics and Eugenics_. _Genetics and Eugenics._

Conklin, Edwin Grant, _The Direction of Human Evolution_. _Evolution._

Darwin, Emma, _A Century of Family Letters_, two volumes. _Family
Letters._

Darwin, _The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_, two volumes. _Life._

De Vries, Hugo, _Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation_.
_Species and Varieties._

Goncourts, Edmond et Jules, _Journal des Goncourts_, nine volumes.
_Goncourts, Journal._

Gray, Asa, _Letters of_, edited by Jane Loring Gray, two volumes.
Gray _Letters._

Grant Duff, Sir Mountstuart E., _Notes from a Diary_, fourteen
volumes, 1851-1901. Grant Duff.

Huxley, Thomas H., _Darwiniana_ (the second volume of Collected
Essays). _Darwiniana._

Huxley, Thomas H., _Life and Letters of_, by his son Leonard, two
volumes. Huxley, _Life._

Lull Richard, Harry Burr Ferris, George Howard Parker, James Rowland
Angell, Albert Galloway Keller, Edwin Grant Conklin, _The Evolution
of Man_. Lull.

Morgan, Thomas Hunt, _Evolution and Adaptation_. _Evolution and
Adaptation._

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, _The Earth Speaks to Bryan_. _The Earth
Speaks._

Osborn, _From the Greeks to Darwin_. _Greeks to Darwin._

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, _Impressions of Great Naturalists_. _Great
Naturalists._

Parker, George Howard, _What Evolution Is_. _What Evolution Is._

Pearson, Karl, _The Grammar of Science_. _Grammar of Science._

Thoreau, Henry, _Journal_, fourteen volumes. _Journal._

_Vallery-Radot, Pasteur._ _Vallery-Radot, Pasteur._

Wallace, Alfred Russell, _My Life_, two volumes. Wallace, _Life_.

Whitehead, Alfred North, _Science and_ _the Modern World_. _Science
and the Modern World._




NOTES


CHAPTER I: THE OBSERVER

[1] _Journal des Goncourts_, May 1, 1857, vol. I, p. 182.

[2] Ben Jonson, _The Poetaster_, act II, scene 1.

[3] _Sentimental Journey_, ‘In the Street.’

[4] _Portraits Littéraires_, vol. III, p. 546.

[5] _Expression_, p. 80.

[6] Thoreau, _Journal_, vol. VII, p. 46.

[7] Gray, to Darwin, May 18, 1862, Gray, _Letters_, vol. II, p. 481.

[8] _Great Naturalists_, p. 51.

[9] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 72.

[10] _Life_, vol. I, p. 83.

[11] To Farrar, November 26, 1868, _Life_, vol. II, p. 453.

[12] To Hooker, 1867, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 6.

[13] To Lyell, June 1, 1867, _Life_, vol. II, p. 248.

[14] To Wilson, April 29, 1878, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 421.

[15] To Galton, November, 1879, _Life_, vol. II, p. 414.

[16] To Lyell, March 17, 1863, _Life_, vol. II, p. 201.

[17] To Galton, November 8, 1872, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 108.

[18] _Expression_, p. 184.

[19] To Dr. Ogle, March 12, 1871, _Life_, vol. II, p. 321.

[20] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 4.

[21] To Jenyns, October 17, 1846, _Life_, vol. I, p. 396.

[22] _Beagle Journal_, p. 282.

[23] To Gray, June 3, 1874, _Life_, vol. II, p. 457.

[24] To Hooker, December 11, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 148.

[25] To Scott, July 2, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 323.

[26] To Horner, January, 1847, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 224.

[27] _Expression_, p. 12.

[28] _Life_, vol. II, p. 238.

[29] _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 105.

[30] _Life_, vol. I, p. 40.

[31] _Different Forms of Flowers_, p. 189.

[32] To Wiesner, October 4, 1881, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 432.

[33] _Life_, vol. I, p. 124.

[34] _Ibid._

[35] _Life_, vol. I, p. 125.

[36] _Life_, vol. II, p. 453.

[37] _Cirripedia_, p. 155.

[38] To Lyell, September 12, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 133.

[39] _Darwiniana_, p. 275.

[40] To Hooker, February 4, 1861, _Life_, vol. II, p. 153.

[41] To Lyell, March 9, 1850, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 229.

[42] _Life_, vol. I, p. 125.

[43] _Life_, vol. I, p. 105.

[44] _Life_, vol. I, p. 80.

[45] _Life_, vol. I, p. 121.

[46] _Purgatorio_, canto III.

[47] To Miss S. Darwin, August 4, 1836, _Life_, vol. I, p. 237.

[48] To Hooker, 1847, _Life_, vol. I, p. 317.

[49] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 3.

[50] To Miss C. Darwin, November 8, 1834, _Life_, vol. I, p. 230.

[51] _Beagle Journal_, p. 78.

[52] _Life_, vol. I, p. 109.

[53] _Expression_, p. 194.

[54] To Romanes, May 29, 1876, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 364.

[55] To Fox, May, 1832, _Life_, vol. I, p. 206.

[56] To Henslow, May 18, 1832, _Life_, vol. I, p. 208.

[57] To Henslow, August 15, 1832, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 9.

[58] _Journal_, August 29, 1858, vol. XI, p. 137.

[59] _Journal_, December 4, 1856, vol. IX, p. 158.

[60] _Life_, vol. I, p. 368.

[61] _Worms_, p. 97.

[62] _Origin_, p. 105.

[63] In _Popular Science Monthly_, April, 1909, vol. LXXIV, p. 198.


CHAPTER II: THE THINKER

[64] To Bates, November 22, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 176.

[65] To Fawcett, September 18, 1861, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 195.

[66] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 93.

[67] _Life_, vol. I, p. 40.

[68] Answer to questionnaire, _Life_, vol. II, p. 355.

[69] _Life of Huxley_, vol. I, p. 521.

[70] To Wallace, August 28, 1872, _Life_, vol. II, p. 346.

[71] To Balfour, September 4, 1880, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 424.

[72] _Beagle Journal_, p. 378.

[73] To Wallace, December 22, 1857, _Life_, vol. I, p. 465.

[74] _Journal_, March 23, 1853, vol. V, p. 45.

[75] Gray to Canby, July 14, 1874, Gray, _Letters_, vol. II, p. 649.

[76] Gray to Darwin, July 21, 1863, Gray, _Letters_, vol. II, p. 509.

[77] _Life_, vol. I, p. 79.

[78] To Fox, March 24, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 506.

[79] _Life_, vol. I, p. 83.

[80] To Hooker, February, 1846, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 56.

[81] To Wallace, February 26, 1867, _Life_, vol. II, p. 276.

[82] _Grammar of Science_, p. 38.

[83] To Huxley, December 2, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 147.

[84] To Hooker, November 15, 1855, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 84.

[85] To Gray, November 29, 1859, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 126.

[86] _Beagle Journal_, p. 443.

[87] _Life_, vol. I, p. 83.

[88] Thiselton Dyer, in _Life_, vol. II, p. 431.

[89] To Gray, 1857, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 252.

[90] To Hooker, January 11, 1844, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 39.

[91] To Wallace, May 1, 1857, _Life_, vol. I, p. 454.

[92] To Carpenter, November 19, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 19.

[93] To Huxley, May 27, 1865, _Life_, vol. II, p. 228.

[94] Aristotle, _Historia Animalium_, Book I, chapter VI.

[95] _Life_, vol. I, p. 126.

[96] To Hooker, April 14, 1855, _Life_, vol. I, p. 415.

[97] To Hooker, March 26, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 474.

[98] _Genetics and Eugenics_, p. 181.

[99] De Vries, _Species and Varieties_, p. 769.

[100] _Different Forms of Flowers_, p. 156.

[101] To Gray, April 3, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 90.

[102] _Zur Naturwissenschaft, Einzelne Betrachtungen und Aphorismen_,
section III.

[103] _Life_, vol. I, p. 121.

[104] To Wiesner, October 25, 1881, _Life_, vol. II, p. 510.

[105] _Life_, vol. I, p. 122.

[106] _Orchids_, p. 208.

[107] To Huxley, November 27, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 75.

[108] _Insectivorous Plants_, p. 154.

[109] To Gray, June 8, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 153.

[110] Huxley to Romanes, May 9, 1882, _Life of Huxley_, vol. II, p.
42.

[111] Huxley to Foster, February 14, 1888, _Life of Huxley_, vol. II,
p. 203.

[112] Huxley to Hooker, March 9, 1888, _Life of Huxley_, vol. II, p.
204.

[113] _Darwiniana_, p. 287.

[114] Alexander Agassiz to Gibbs, December 15, 1897, in G. R.
Agassiz, _Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz_, p. 333.

[115] J. J. Stevenson, in _Popular Science Monthly_, April, 1909,
vol. LXXIV, p. 353.

[116] October 2, 1879, _Life_, vol. II, p. 360.

[117] May 5, 1881, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 198.

[118] _Descent_, p. 606.

[119] September 23, 1868, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 85.

[120] August 19, 1868, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 84.

[121] To Wallace, April 30, 1868, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 77.

[122] To Huxley, June 12, 1867, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 281.

[123] _Animals and Plants_, vol. II, p. 396.

[124] _Animals and Plants_, vol. II, p. 399.

[125] _Life_, vol. I, p. 75.

[126] August Weisman, _The Evolution Theory_ (translation Thomson),
vol. I, p. 242.

[127] _Darwiniana_, p. 20.

[128] To Hooker, January 20, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 499.

[129] _Life_, vol. I, p. 77.

[130] Vallery-Radot, _Pasteur_, p. 139.

[131] _Life_, vol. I, p. 71.

[132] To Lyell, September 20, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 521.

[133] _Life_, vol. I, p. 130.

[134] _Life_, vol. I, p. 117.

[135] July 2, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 116.

[136] To Lyell, August 1, 1845, _Life_, vol. I, p. 308.

[137] To Hooker, September 25, 1853, _Life_, vol. I, p. 400.

[138] _Origin_, p. 404.

[139] To Hooker, October, 1856, _Life_, vol. I, p. 443.

[140] To Henslow, _Life_, vol. I, p. 245.

[141] To Huxley, July 3, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 117.

[142] _Life_, vol. I, p. 72.

[143] To Lyell, October 1, 1861, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 191.

[144] _Zur Naturwissenschaft, Einzelne Betrachtungen und Aphorismen_,
section III.

[145] To Hooker, December 10, 1866, _Life_, vol. II, p. 239.

[146] To Hooker, May 2, 1857, _Life_, vol. I, p. 454.

[147] _Darwiniana_, p. 246.

[148] To De Candolle, January 14, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. I, p.
234.

[149] To Hooker, April 1, 1864, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 330.

[150] To Hooker, April, 1857, _Life_, vol. I, p. 450.

[151] To Hooker, March 7, 1855, _Life_, vol. I, p. 405.

[152] To Hooker, July 30, 1856, _Life_, vol. I, p. 439.

[153] To Huxley, January 10, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 231.


CHAPTER III: THE DISCOVERER

[154] _Historia Animalium_, book VIII, chapter XXVIII.

[155] _Historia Animalium_, book VIII, chapter XXIX.

[156] _Beagle Journal_, p. 216.

[157] To Hooker, January 11, 1844, _Life_, vol. I, p. 384.

[158] To Hooker, November, 1844, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 43.

[159] To Lyell, October, 11, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 10.

[160] _Greeks to Darwin_, p. 156.

[161] _Greeks to Darwin_, p. 233.

[162] To Lyell, March 12, 1863, _Life_, vol. II, p. 199.

[163] Marcus Herzog, introduction to Samuel Butler’s _Unconscious
Memory_, p. XII.

[164] To Lyell, March 17, 1863, _Life_, vol. II, p. 201.

[165] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 37.

[166] _MS. Journals_, in _Life_, vol. I, p. 363.

[167] To Horace Darwin, December 15, 1871, _Family Letters_, vol. II,
p. 207.

[168] P. 426.

[169] June 18, 1858, _Life_, vol. I, p. 473.

[170] To Lyell, June 25, 1858, _Life_, vol. I, p. 474.

[171] Hooker to Francis Darwin, _Life_, vol. I, p. 482.

[172] In _Popular Science Monthly_, April, 1909, vol. LXXIV, p. 396.

[173] To Wallace, April 20, 1870, _Life_, vol. II, p. 301.

[174] _Darwiniana_, p. 286.

[175] _Animals and Plants_, vol. I, p. 225.

[176] _Descent_, p. 563.

[177] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 2.

[178] _Life_, vol. I, p. 54.

[179] To Hooker, November 5, 1854, _Life_, vol. I, p. 404.

[180] To Hooker, July 13, 1858, _Life_, vol. I, p. 484.

[181] _Life_, vol. I, p. 46.

[182] To Fox, March 24, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 506.

[183] _Life_, vol. I, p. 55.

[184] _Life_, p. 71.

[185] In _Life_, vol. II, p. 115.

[186] To Lyell, April 10, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 94.

[187] To Huxley, December 18, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 230.

[188] _Great Naturalists_, p. 70.

[189] Agassiz to Murray, December 2, 1887, G. R. Agassiz, _Letters
and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz_, p. 228.

[190] To Falconer, January 5, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 228.

[191] To Huxley, April 11, 1864, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 246.

[192] To Henslow, October 26, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 174.

[193] To Wallace, July 12, 1871, _Life_, II, p. 326.

[194] To Häckel, May 21, 1867, _Life_, vol. II, p. 251.

[195] Huxley to Darwin, November 14, 1880, _Life of Huxley_, vol. II,
p. 15.

[196] To Hooker, December 25, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 46.

[197] Speech, November, 1877, _Life of Huxley_, vol. I, p. 514.

[198] P. 262.

[199] To Hooker, December 14, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 38.

[200] To Gray, April 3, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 91.

[201] To Henslow, May 8, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 149.

[202] _Origin_, p. 133.

[203] _Origin_, p. 143.

[204] _Origin_, p. 228.

[205] _Origin_, p. 233.

[206] _Orchids_, p. 257.

[207] To Huxley, May 11, 1880, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 387.

[208] _Darwiniana_, p. 184.

[209] To Lyell, September 20, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 521.

[210] To Hooker, June 17, 1856, _Life_, vol. I, p. 432.

[211] To Falconer, October 1, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 206.

[212] _Origin_, p. 162.

[213] To Hooker, July 5, 1856, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 93.

[214] To Miller, June 5, 1859, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 122.

[215] To Hooker, June 30, 1862, _Life_, II, p. 445.

[216] To Wallace, July 12, 1871, _Life_, vol. II, p. 325.

[217] To Hooker, June 15, 1881, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 433.

[218] To Falconer, October 1, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 209.

[219] To Lyell, September 26, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 167.

[220] To Hooker, January 16, 1869, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 379.

[221] _Evolution and Adaptation_, p. 231.

[222] _Greeks to Darwin_, p. 229.

[223] November 7, 1875, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 360.

[224] _Descent_, p. 61.

[225] In _Life_, vol. II, p. 187, from _Life of Kingsley_, vol. II,
p. 171.

[226] To Hooker, April or May, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 512.

[227] To Gray, October, 1865, _Life_, vol. I, p. 489.

[228] _Life_, vol. I, p. 82.

[229] _Greeks to Darwin_, p. 5.

[230] _Science and the Modern World_, p. 158.

[231] _What Evolution is_, p. 17.

[232] _Evolution_, p. 16.

[233] _The Earth Speaks_, p. 19.

[234] Quoted in _Boston Transcript_ review of translation of Weber’s
_History of Philosophy_, February 6, 1926.


CHAPTER IV: THE LOSER

[235] To Hooker, October 13, 1858, _Life_, vol. I, p. 495.

[236] To Hooker, June 17, 1868, _Life_, vol. II, p. 273.

[237] _Life_, vol. I, p. 81.

[238] _Life_, vol. I, p. 81.

[239] _Life_, vol. I, p. 30.

[240] To Lyell, January 22, 1865, _Life_, vol. II, p. 216.

[241] To Morley, March 24, 1871, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 326.

[242] Lull, p. 129.

[243] To Hooker, December 21, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 21.

[244] To Hooker, September 27, 1865, _Life_, vol. II, p. 225.

[245] To Henslow, May 18, 1832, _Life_, vol. I, p. 220.

[246] _Life_, vol. II, p. 356.

[247] To Herbert, June 2, 1833, _Life_, vol. I, p. 210.

[248] _Reminiscences of Charles Darwin_, in _Harper’s Magazine_,
December, 1909, vol. CXX, p. 15.

[249] To Müller, August 28, 1870, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 92.

[250] _Beagle Journal_, p. 499.

[251] _Life_, vol. II, p. 377.

[252] _Descent of Man_, p. 70.

[253] _Life_, vol. II, p. 309.

[254] To Wallace, July 12, 1881, in Wallace, _Life_, vol. II, p. 15.

[255] To Wallace, July 12, 1881, in Wallace, _Life_, vol. II, p. 14.

[256] To Lyell, January 22, 1865, _Life_, vol. II, p. 217.

[257] _Krause_, p. 70.

[258] Emma Wedgwood to Madame Sismondi, November 15, 1838, _Family
Letters_, vol. II, p. 7.

[259] To Gurney, July 8, 1876, _Life_, vol. II, p. 364.

[260] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 171.

[261] _Life_, vol. I, p. 103.

[262] _Ibid._

[263] _Beagle Journal_, p. 112.

[264] _Life_, vol. I, p. 43.

[265] _Life_, vol. I, p. 42.

[266] To Susan Darwin, April 23, 1835, _Life_, vol. I, p. 233.

[267] _Life_, vol. I, p. 146.

[268] _Life_, vol. I, p. 42.

[269] _Life_, vol. I, p. 81.

[270] _Life_, vol. II, p. 178.

[271] To Mrs. Haliburton, November 22, 1880, _Life_, vol. II, p. 508.

[272] To Henslow, July 24, 1834, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 14.

[273] To Hooker, March 17, 1867, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 2.

[274] To Rivers, December 28, 1866, _Life_, vol. II, p. 241.

[275] _Darwiniana_, p. 286.

[276] _Life_, vol. I, p. 102.

[277] _Life_, vol. I, p. 81.

[278] _Ibid._

[279] _Life_, vol. I, p. 57.

[280] _Life_, vol I, p. 81.

[281] E. B. Titchener, in _Popular Science Monthly_, January, 1909,
vol. LXXIV, p. 47.

[282] _Causeries du Lundi_, vol. IV, p. 45.

[283] To Newton, May 3, 1780, _The Correspondence of William Cowper_
(edition Wright), vol. I, p. 185.

[284] _Poems_ (Globe edition), p. 191.

[285] _Childe Harold_, canto III, stanza 72.

[286] Sénancour, _Obermann_, p. 40.

[287] _Life_, vol. I, p. 95.

[288] To Mrs. Darwin, April, 1858, _Life_, vol. I, p. 471.

[289] _Beagle Journal_, p. 322.

[290] To Henslow, August 15, 1832, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 10.

[291] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 175.

[292] Mrs. Darwin to Darwin, 1859, _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 175.

[293] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 201.

[294] _Beagle Journal_, p. 263.

[295] _Life_, vol. II, p. 308.

[296] _Ibid._

[297] _Descent of Man_, p. 612.

[298] _Life_, vol. II, p. 238.

[299] _Life_, vol. II, p. 237.

[300] William Darwin, in _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 169.

[301] _Expression_, p. 219.

[302] _Beagle Journal_, p. 411.

[303] _Life_, vol. I, p. 29.

[304] _Life_, vol. I, p. 282.

[305] To Lyell, September 3, 1874, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 237.

[306] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 253.

[307] To Ridley, November 28, 1878, _Life_, vol. II, p. 412.

[308] To Gray, July, 1860, _Life_, vol. I, p. 284.


CHAPTER V: THE LOVER

[309] Norton to Ruskin, September 9, 1868, _Letters of Charles Eliot
Norton_, vol. I, p. 309.

[310] _Great Naturalists_, p. 57.

[311] _Reminiscences of Charles Darwin_, in _Harper’s Magazine_,
December, 1909, vol. CXX, p. 13.

[312] To Francis Darwin, November 11, 1887, _The Life and Letters of
Leslie Stephen_, by Frederic William Maitland, p. 393.

[313] To Norton, _Life of Stephen_ as above, p. 300.

[314] To Falconer, November 8, 1864, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 257.

[315] Norton, Diary, April 12, 1873, in _Letters of Charles Eliot
Norton_, vol. I, p. 477.

[316] Kingsley to Lubbock, in _Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord
Avebury_, by Horace G. Hutchinson, vol. I, p. 92.

[317] Grant Duff, _Diary, 1873-1881_, December 15, 1880, vol. II, p.
283.

[318] July, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 159.

[319] September 5, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 205.

[320] To Hooker, April 23, 1861, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 185.

[321] To Fox, March 13, 1837, _Life_, vol. I, p. 249.

[322] _Life_, vol. I, p. 42.

[323] _Life_, vol. I, p. 28.

[324] _Life_, vol. I, p. 49.

[325] _Life_, vol. I, p. 89.

[326] _Life_, vol. I, p. 30.

[327] _Life_, vol. I, p. 96.

[328] Answer to questionnaire, _Life_, vol. II, p. 415.

[329] To Mrs. Darwin, March, 1842, _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 69.

[330] To Fox, March 24, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 506.

[331] January 28, 1876, _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 221.

[332] To Hooker, September 1, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 518.

[333] _Life_, vol. I, p. 85.

[334] To Falconer, November 14, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 211.

[335] To Hooker, May 29, 1854, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 79.

[336] _Life_, vol. I, p. 243.

[337] _Life_, vol. I, p. 197.

[338] To Hooker, November, 1863, _Life_, vol. II, p. 186.

[339] To Henslow, May 6, 1849, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 66.

[340] _Life_, vol. I, p. 96.

[341] _Diary, 1892-1895_, August 6, 1892, vol. I, p. 80.

[342] Emma Wedgwood to Madame Sismondi, November 15, 1838, _Family
Letters_, vol. II, p. 7.

[343] To Hooker, April 10, 1846, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 416.

[344] To Murray, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 532.

[345] _Life_, vol. I, p. 99.

[346] _Life_, vol. I, p. 98.

[347] _Life_, vol. I, p. 99.

[348] _Reminiscences_, in _Harper’s Magazine_, December, 1909, vol.
CXX, p. 17.

[349] Grant Duff, _Diary, 1896-1901_, vol. I, p. 307.

[350] _Life_, vol. I, p. 118.

[351] _Life_, vol. I, p. 115.

[352] _Life_, vol. I, p. 28.

[353] November, 1855, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 87.

[354] To Hooker, September 27, 1865, _Life_, vol. II, p. 223.

[355] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 118.

[356] January 20, 1839, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 29.

[357] _Ibid._

[358] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 48.

[359] September 5, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 204.

[360] _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 30.

[361] _Ibid._

[362] _Life_, vol. I, p. 135.

[363] To Madame Sismondi, February, 1840, _Family Letters_, vol. II,
p. 51.

[364] _Life_, vol. I, p. 109.

[365] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 253.

[366] To Gray, July 23, 1862, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 202.

[367] _Diary of Thomas Moore_, August 29, 1822, vol. III, p. 367.

[368] _Life_, vol. I, p. 112.

[369] _Life_, p. 111.

[370] _Life_, vol. I, p. 115.

[371] _Life_, vol. I, p. 10.

[372] _Life_, vol. I, p. 76.

[373] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 44.

[374] December 18, 1861, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 281.

[375] To Wallace, February 27, 1868, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 289.

[376] _Life_, vol. I, p. 115.

[377] Krause, p. 29.

[378] _Life_, vol. I, p. 31.

[379] _Life_, vol. I, p. 119.

[380] _Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury_, by Horace G.
Hutchinson, vol. I, p. 40.

[381] To Hooker, July 28, 1859, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 126.

[382] To Hooker, April 14, 1855, _Life_, vol. I, p. 415.

[383] To Hooker, November 5, 1853, _Life_, vol. I, p. 356.

[384] September 11, 1859, _Life_, vol. I, p. 520.

[385] To Hooker, May 25, 1870, _Life_, vol. II, p. 306.

[386] To Müller, June 21, 1881, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 369.

[387] Huxley to Mivart, November 12, 1885, _Life of Huxley_, vol. II,
p. 122.

[388] To Hooker, July 2, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 116.


CHAPTER VI: THE DESTROYER

[389] To Hooker, December 5, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 337.

[390] _Life_, vol. I, p. 279.

[391] _Descent_, p. 145.

[392] In _Life_, vol. II, p. 245.

[393] To Hooker, July 13, 1856, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 94.

[394] In _Nature_, 1882, vol. XXVI, p. 5, quoted in _Encyclopædia
Brittanica_ (edition 1884), _Supplement_, article _Darwinism_.

[395] _Origin_, p. 429.

[396] To Gray, September 17, 1861, _Life_, vol. II, p. 170.

[397] To Hooker, March 29, 1863, _Life_, vol. II, p. 202.

[398] _Descent of Man_, p. 121.

[399] _Descent of Man_, p. 612.

[400] _Origin_, p. 164.

[401] _Descent of Man_, p. 100.

[402] _Life_, vol. II, p. 347.

[403] To Hooker, February 9, 1865, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 260.

[404] To Lyell, August 21, 1861, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 194.

[405] To Gray, May 22, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 105.

[406] _Descent of Man_, p. 612.

[407] _Animals and Plants_, vol. II, p. 428.

[408] _Family Letters_, vol. II, p. 196.

[409] To Scherzer, December 26, 1879, _Life_, vol. II, p. 413.

[410] August Weisman, _The Evolution Theory_ (Translation Thomson),
vol. II, p. 364.

[411] Address on Darwin Centenary, in _Contemporary Review_, July,
1909, vol. XCVI, p. 21.

[412] Herbert Spencer, _An Autobiography_, vol. II, p. 548.

[413] _The Earth Speaks_, p. 63.

[414] In _Boston Herald_, June 3, 1926.

[415] Lull, p. 146.

[416] _Saturday Review of Literature_, editorial, May 29, 1926.

[417] Reverend Charles G. Finney, _Memoirs, Written by Himself_, p.
171.

[418] Jules Lemaître, _Impressions de Théâtre_, vol. IV, p. 114.

[419] _Life_, vol. II, p. 239.

[420] Answers to Questions, in _Boston Herald_, January 4, 1926.

[421] To Hooker, January 19, 1865, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 260.

[422] _Evolution_, p. 247.

[423] Conklin, _Evolution_, p. 240.

[424] _La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein_, act IV, scene 3.

[425] _Palinodia._

[426] _La Ginestra._

[427] Ernest Renan, _Drames Philosophiques_, p. 174.

[428] Ernest Renan, _Drames Philosophiques_, p. 178.

[429] _Anatole France Himself_, by J. J. Brousson (translation
Pollock), p. 71.

[430] _The Mysterious Stranger_, p. 150.

[431] _Sopra un Basso Relievo Antico Sepolcrale._


CHAPTER VII: THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT

[432] To Scott, June 6, 1863, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 323.

[433] To Huxley, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 125.

[434] Hooker on Darwin, _Life_, vol. I, p. 315.

[435] To Huxley, July 20, 1860, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 158.

[436] To Günther, May 15, 1870, _Life_, vol. II, p. 303.

[437] To Dohrn, January 4, 1870, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 444.

[438] _Science and the Modern World_, p. 255.

[439] Article by J. E. Harry, on the _Helena_ of Euripides, in
_Journal of American Philology_, October, 1925, vol. XLVI, p. 332.

[440] Speech at Royal Society Anniversary Dinner, 1894, Huxley,
_Life_, vol. II, p. 413.

[441] To Hooker, July 28, 1868, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 305.

[442] To Farrar, August 28, 1881, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 394.

[443] To Hooker, March 3, 1860, _Life_, vol. II, p. 85.

[444] To Lubbock, November 12, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 14.

[445] To Carpenter, November 19, 1859, _Life_, vol. II, p. 19.

[446] To Madame d’Epinay, July 6, 1766, _Correspondance de Voltaire_
(edition 1881), vol. XII, p. 329.

[447] To Hooker, 1856, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 90.

[448] To Wiesner, October 25, 1881, _Life_, vol. II, p. 508.

[449] To Bentham, November 25, 1869, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 379.

[450] To Wilson, March 5, 1879, _More Letters_, vol. II, p. 422.

[451] Darwin to Wallace, August 8, 1872, _Life_, vol. II, p. 348.

[452] Vallery-Radot, _Pasteur_, p. 22.

[453] To Henslow, April 1, 1848, _More Letters_, vol. I, p. 61.

[454] _Portraits Littéraires_, vol. III, p. 546.

[455] _Port-Royal_, vol. I, p. 55.

[456] _Causeries du Lundi_, vol. II, p. 268.

[457] _Portraits Contemporains_ (1882), vol. V, p. 461.

[458] _Portraits Littéraires_, vol. III, p. 543.

[459] _Portraits Contemporains_ (1882), vol. V, p. 465.

[460] _Portraits Contemporains_ (1882), vol. V, p. 464.

[461] _Portraits Littéraires_, vol. III, p. 543.

[462] _Journal des Goncourts_, vol. II, p. 134.

[463] _Conversations with Eckermann_, quoted in William James,
_Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 137.

[464] _Port-Royal_, vol. VI, p. 245.

[465] To Helvetius, January 5, 1740, _Correspondance_ (edition 1881),
vol. III, p. 356.

[466] Quoted by Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries du Lundi_, vol. VII, p. 47.

[467] _Tristram Shandy_, Book VII, chapter XXXIII.

[468] _Maximen und Reflexionen_, chapter III.

[469] _Journal de Henri Frédéric Amiel_, vol. I, p. 129.

[470] _Discoveries_, in Jonson’s Works (edition Cunningham), vol.
III, p. 401.

[471] _Homeric Epigrams_ (edition Baumeister), V.




INDEX


Abstemiousness, D.’s, 182.

Accuracy, D. and, in observation, 21; in statement, 22, 23;
mathematical, and instruments, 24; his hobby, 59.

Achievement, motives, 96-99; D.’s attitude, 99-101.

Adams, Henry, effect of evolution on, 242.

Æsthetics, observation in, 11; D.’s attitude, 137; effect of
scientific spirit, 272, 275.

Agassiz, Alexander, on D.’s coral-reef theory, 65; on D. and candor,
105.

Agassiz, Louis, and evolution, 103.

Agnosticism, as dogma, 283, 284.

Agriculture, revolution, 11.

Ambition, as trait, D. on it, 96.

Amiel, H. F., self-dissection, 280.

Animals, D.’s love, 135, 188.

Appearance, D.’s, 168.

Appreciation, D.’s trait, 79, 80; element in scientific spirit, 263.

Architecture, D.’s attitude, 139.

Ardor, element in scientific spirit, 264.

Argument, D.’s attitude, 74.

Aristotle, on experiment, 56; and evolution, 84.

Arnold, Matthew, on Goethe, 271.

Art, D.’s attitude, 138-40; evolution and realism, 225.


Barnacles, D.’s study, 26.

Bates, H. W., and nature, 12.

_Beagle_, D.’s voyage, 4.

Bell, Thomas, and D., 173.

Bergson, Henri, and evolution, 235.

Bryce, Lord, on D. and Gladstone, 133; on D.’s appearance, 168.

Buckle, H. T., D. on, 143.

Buffon, Comte de, and evolution, 84, 119.

Burbank, Luther, and experiment, 57; and future life, 228.

Butler, Samuel, D.’s controversy, 108; and religion and evolution,
237.

Byron, Lord, and nature, 152.


Candor, D.’s trait, 77-79, 105.

Castle, W. E., on experiment, 57.

Caution, element in scientific spirit, 245. _See also_ Deduction.

Chambers, Robert, and evolution, 84.

Children. _See_ Family.

Civil War, D.’s interest, 134.

Collecting, D. and, 43.

Comparison, D.’s trait, 31.

Conklin, E. G., on natural selection, 125; on evolution and religion,
239.

Conscience, activity of D.’s, 160.

Controversy, over evolution, 6; D.’s attitude, 76, 77, 107.

Conversation, D.’s, 170.

Coolidge, Calvin, on politics and religion, 222.

Copernicus, and orthodoxy, 209.

Coral reefs, D.’s theory, 64-66.

Correspondence, character of D.’s, 78, 145.

Cowper, William, and nature, 149, 150.

Creation, desire, 98.

Criticism, D.’s attitude, 104-17.

Cruelty, D.’s hatred, 135.

Curiosity, element of scientific spirit, 248, 249; Sainte-Beuve and
Goethe and, 268, 270.


Darwin, Charles R., influence, 3; character, 3; birth, 3; ancestry,
3; education, 4, 45; interest in outdoor life and sport, 4, 174-76;
_Beagle_ voyage, 4, 14; marriage, home and children, family life,
4, 196-201; invalidism, patience, 5, 36, 177-83, 193-95; tomb,
6; scientific observation, on it, 6, 14-16; and self-analysis,
16; study of expression, 17-19, 198; promotion of observation by
others, 19, 23; accuracy, 21-24, 59; and detail, 25; industry and
patience, 27-30, 252; system, 30, 31, 183; element of comparison,
31; difficulties and discomforts of outdoor observation, 32-34;
sympathy, and observation, 34-36; effect of physical limitations, 36,
37; and collecting, 43; and observation and deduction, 44-46, 250;
on Spencer, 47, 78; and deduction and induction, 46-48; mental power
and activity, 48; control over theorizing, 51, 54, 55, 115, 124; on
excessive theorizing, 52, 53, 254; and experiment, 56-62; exposition,
style, caution, 62-64, 143-45, 212; on coral reefs, 64-66; on sexual
selection, 66, 67; on pangenesis, 68; and metaphysics, 69; doubt and
self-criticism, 70, 71; and objections and difficulties, 71, 72,
113-15; and revision, 73, 118; and argument, 74-76; and controversy,
76, 107; and mistakes, 77; candor, 77-79, 105; as correspondent, 78,
145; appreciation and tolerance, 79, 80, 262, 263; and ignorance
and deceptive reasoning, 80-82; and motives of achievement, 99-101;
Butler controversy, 108; humility, 110, 258, 260; success of books,
122; fame, 126; atrophy of other interests, 128-30, 272, 275;
and history, 130, 131; and politics, 131-34; and Civil War, 134;
and slavery, 134; and animals, hatred of cruelty, 135, 188; and
vivisection, 136; and social questions, 136, 137; and æsthetics,
137-40; and music, 140-42; and fiction, 145; and poetry, 146-48; and
natural beauty, 148, 153-56; and religion and conscience, 156-63;
personal appearance, 168; hospitality, 169; conversation, 170-72;
fun, 172; and society, 173, 178; humanity, 176; abstemiousness and
indulgence, 182; regimen, 183; finances, 184-86; generosity, 186;
manner and temperament, 188; and his father, 190; as fiancé, 190-92;
as husband, wife’s care, 192-94; friendship and services, 201-07;
impartiality, 256; on scientific ardor, 264; on love of truth, 266.
_See also_ Evolution.

Darwin, Emma (Wedgwood), 4; and theater, 139; and D.’s religious
attitude, 157; D. as fiancé, 190-92, and as husband, 192; as wife,
and D.’s invalidism, 193-96; and D.’s theories, 218.

Darwin, Erasmus, 4; and evolution, 84, 85; controversy over
biography, 108.

Deduction, observation and, 44-46; and induction, 46-48; D.’s
attitude, 46, 47; D.’s power, 48-50, 69; his control over it, 51,
54, 55, 115, 124; D. on excessive, 52, 53; types of thinkers, 53-55;
experiment and, 55; D. and experiment, 56-62; D. and exposition,
62-64; illustrations of his theorizing, 64-69; D. and doubt, 70,
71; D. and objections, 71, 72; his trait of revision, 73; D. and
arguments, 74-77; D. and mistakes, 77; D. and deception in reason,
80-82, 115. _See also_ Observation; Scientific spirit.

Democracy, evolution and, 223.

Details, D. and, 25.

De Vries, Hugo, imitation theory, 124.

Discipline, D. and his children, 197.

Doubt, value, 70; in D.’s logical processes, 70, 71; aspects of
agnosticism, 203-05. _See also_ Religion.

Drink, D. and, 182.


Earthworms, D.’s study, 21, 42, 151.

Education, D.’s, 4; training in deduction, 45.

Eliot, C. W., effect of evolution on, 246.

Emerson, R. W., on evolution, 42, 234; and nature, 151.

Empedocles, and evolution, 84.

Ethics, D. and morality, 160; and evolution, 213-15, 219, 222, 231.

Evolution, idea and D.’s explanation of process, 4; controversy, 6;
acceptance of principle, 6, 121, 125; effect on study of natural
history, 40-43; as term, 83; before Darwin, 83-85, 101, 233; theory
of inheritance of acquired characters, D. and, 85, 87; D. and
predecessors, 85-88; beginning of D.’s interest, 88; his development
of theory of natural selection, 89-91; his statement of theory, 91;
his realization of influence of theory, 92, 209-13; his years of
study and experiment, 92, 93; Wallace and presentation of theory,
93, 94; D. and Wallace, 94, 95; _Origin of Species_, its effect, 96;
D.’s attitude toward, as achievement, 99-101, 122-24; attacks by
scientists, 102; religious attacks, 103; D. and attacks, 104-08; D.
and other workers, 109; D. and difficulties, 111-17; D.’s revisions,
118; modification of theory, 119-21, 124; promulgators, 121; effect
on theology, 209; D.’s caution in statement, 212; D. and ethical
standards under theory, 213; D. and effect on belief, 215, 216;
D. and belief in God, 216-18; and atheism, 218-20; as typifying
scientific influence on life, 221; influence on politics, 222-25; and
realism, 225; and hell and heaven, 227; and popular belief in God and
worship, 229, 230; and substitute for sin, 231-33; philosophical,
233-35; clerical harmonizing with religion, 236; Fundamentalists
and, 237, 282; scientific harmonizing, 237-39; and individualism in
religious belief, 239, 240; future adjustment with religion, 240;
destructive spiritual effect, 241-47; self-contradictions in reason,
280.

Experiment, D.’s devotion, 5, 56; position, 55; equipment, 57; D.’s
thoroughness, 58; impersonality, 58; accuracy, repetition, 59;
recording, errors and successes, 61.

Exposition, D.’s power, 62-64; illustrations, 64-69.

Expression, D.’s study, 17-19.

Eye, and evolutionary theory, 112.


Fabre, J. H., and nature, 12.

Fame, as motive of achievement, 96-101.

Family, D. and father’s memory, 190; D. as fiancé, 190-92; husband
and wife, 192-96; children, training, 196-201; their assistance, 200.

Farrer, Sir Thomas, on D.’s detailed observation, 26.

Fichte, J. H. von, and evolution, 233.

Fiction, D.’s attitude, 145.

Financial condition, D.’s, 184; his attitude and care, 185; his
generosity, 186.

Finney, C. G., on revival, 230.

Fiske, John, and evolution, 122, 241.

France, Anatole, effect of evolution on, 242.

Friendship, D.’s trait, 201, 202; his influence over friends, 202;
his dependence, 203; his services to friends, 204-07.

Fun, D.’s trait, 172.

Fundamentalism, attacks on evolution, 103, 282; ethical attitude,
232; theological attitude, 237.


Gautier, Théophile, on observation, 7; as poet, 11.

Generosity, D.’s trait, 186.

George, Henry D. and _Progress and Poverty_, 137.

Gladstone, W. E., and D., 133.

God, D.’s attitude, 164-67; influence of evolution on belief, 216-18,
229; thirst for, 285.

Goethe, J. W. von, on repetitions, 59; on doubt, 70; on mistakes,
77; and evolution, 85; and poetry, 148; on love of truth, 265; and
scientific spirit, 270, 271; pessimism, 274; on active ignorance, 279.

Gould, George M., on D.’s invalidism, 180.

Grant Duff, Sir M. E., on D., 182.

Gray, Asa, on D.’s observation, 14; on D. as thinker, 49; relations
with D., 110; and evolution, 121, 238.


Häckel, Ernst, and D., 110; and evolution, 122; atheism, 219.

Hartmann, K. R. E. von, and evolution, 233.

Hegel, G. W. F., type, 53; and evolution, 233.

Hell, obsolete, 227.

History, D. and, 130, 131.

Homer, on self-ignorance, 282.

Hooker, Sir Joseph, on Darwin-Wallace paper, 94; and D., 101, 110.

Hospitality, D.’s, 169.

Humanity, and study of natural history, 40-43, 136; Sainte-Beuve’s
study, 267, 268.

Humility, D.’s trait, 110; and scientific spirit, 257-61.

Huxley, T. H., on D. and detailed observation, 26; on D.’s industry,
27; and induction, 46; on D.’s mental processes, 62; on D.’s candor,
79; on effect of _Origin of Species_, 96; and Bishop of Oxford’s
attack, 103; restraint of D., 108; on D. and adverse suggestions,
115; and promulgation of D.’s theory, 121; on D.’s style, 144;
relations with D., 203-05; on influence of D.’s appreciation, 206;
and religion, 219; on D.’s impartiality, 256.


Ibsen, Henrik, effect of evolution on, 241.

Ignorance, realization and scientific spirit, 257, 283.

Imagination. _See_ Deduction.

Immortality, D.’s attitude, 163; effect of evolution, 215.

Impartiality, element in scientific spirit, 255; Sainte-Beuve and,
268.

Induction, and deduction, 46-48. _See also_ Deduction.

Industry, D.’s, 27; element in scientific spirit, 251.

Inheritance of acquired characters, Lamarck’s theory, 85, 90; D.’s
attitude toward, 87, 119, 120.

Instruments, D.’s faith, 25.

Instinct in practical life, 278, 279.

Interests, absorption and atrophy, 128-30, 272.

Invalidism, D.’s, 5, 36, 177; his attitude toward it, 178, 179, 194;
cause, 179-81; Mrs. D.’s care, 193-96.


James, William, and evolution, 234.

Jeffries, Richard, and nature, 12.

Jonson, Ben, on observation, 7; on self-ignorance, 282.


Kingsley, Charles, on evolutionary theory, 121; on D.’s conversation,
171.

Knowledge, and observation, 38-40; and wisdom, 44.

Krause, Ernst, biography of Erasmus Darwin, 108.


Lamarck, Jean de, evolutionary theory, 85, 90, 119, 120; D.’s
attitude, 86.

Land question, D. and, 136.

Leibnitz, Baron von, and gravity, 257.

Leopardi, Giacomo, pessimism, 238, 245.

Literature, D.’s attitude, 143, 145-48; D.’s style, 143-45; effect
of evolution, 225-27.

Linnæan Society, Darwin-Wallace paper, 94.

Lodge, Sir Oliver, and science and spiritualism, 238.

Love, D.’s valuation, 206. _See also_ Family; Friendship.

Lubbock, Sir John, on debt to D., 202.

Lucretius, type, 54; scientific ardor, 265.

Lyell, Sir Charles, on controversy, 76; and evolution, 84; and D.,
101, 110; on D. and ‘remorse,’ 211.


McDougall, William, on inheritance of acquired characters, 85.

Maine de Biran, self-dissection, 280.

Manner, D.’s, 188.

Marriage of cousins, D. and, 136.

Mendel, Gregor, experiments, 124.

Milton, John, D.’s appreciation, 146.

Missing links in evolutionary theory, 113.

Missionaries, D.’s attitude, 159.

Mistakes, D.’s attitude, 77.

Mivart, St. G. J., and evolution and religion, 238.

Montesquieu, on study, 277.

Moody, D. L., absorption of interest, 129; and prayer, 162; and God,
167; and hell and heaven, 227, 228.

Moore, Thomas, on children, 196.

Morality. _See_ Ethics.

Morgan, Lloyd, and evolution, 235.

Music, D.’s attitude, 140-42.


Native, utilitarian and æsthetic observation, 10-13; D. and
appreciation, 148, 153-56; elements of enjoyment, 149-53.

Natural selection, D.’s term and theory, 5, 90; modification of
theory, 119-21, 124. _See also_ Evolution.

Neuter insects, and evolutionary theory, 113.

Nietzsche, F. W., effect of evolution on, 241.

Norton, C. E., on D., 168, 170.


Objections, in D.’s logical processes, 71.

Observation, D.’s scientific trait, 6, 14, 19-21; as general trait,
6-8; by women, 8; exclusive, 8; of humanity, 9, 267, 268; of nature,
change in character, 10; ulterior, 11; æsthetic, 11; delight, 12,
38, 148-54; Thoreau, 13; D.’s comments, 15; D.’s general trait,
16; his study of expression, 17-19; D. and accuracy, 21; accuracy
in statement, 22-24; D. and information from others, 19, 23;
mathematical, and instruments, 24; detailed, 25; D.’s industry and
patience, 27-29; need of patience, 29; system, 30, 31; comparison,
31; difficulties and discomforts, 32-34; and sympathy, 34-36; effect
of D.’s physical limitations, 36, 37; knowledge as aid, 38-40; effect
of evolution on, 40-43. _See also_ Deduction; Scientific spirit.

_Origin of Species_, publication, effect, 5, 96; exposition, 63;
revisions, 73, 118; success, 122.

Osborn, H. F., on D.’s observation, 14; on D. and Lamarck, 87; on D.
and criticism, 105; on D.’s change in attitude, 120; on D.’s fame,
124; on D.’s appearance, 168; on ethical effect of evolution, 222.

Owen, Sir Richard, and evolution, 103, 107, 111.

Oxford, Bishop of, attack on evolution, 103.


Pangenesis, D.’s theory, 68.

Parker, G. H., on evolution, 125.

Pascal, Blaise, on man, 275.

Pasteur, Louis, and objections, 72; scientific ardor, 265.

Patience, D.’s, 28; element in scientific spirit, 29, 253.

Pearson, Karl, on D. and imagination, 51.

Pedantry, and scientific spirit, 257.

Perry, R. B., on evolution, 125.

Pessimism, and evolution, 233; Sainte-Beuve’s, 272, 276; Goethe’s,
274.

Philosophy, D. and self-analysis, 16; D. and metaphysics, 69;
evolutionary, 233.

Poetry, D.’s attitude, 146-48; Sainte-Beuve and, 268.

Politics, D. and, 131-33; influence of evolution, 222.

Pragmatism, and evolution, 234.

Prayer, D.’s attitude, 161-63.

Primogeniture, D.’s attitude, 136.

Pugnacity, and scientific spirit, 261.


Realism, as fruit of evolution, 225.

Reason, and instinct, 277-79; as agent of scientific spirit, 279;
evolutionary contradictions, 280, 282; and attainment of truth, 281.
_See also_ Deduction; Scientific spirit.

Religion, D.’s attitude, 156-67; pre-Darwinian theology, 208; and
Copernicus’s speculations, 209; theological effect of evolution,
209; D.’s attitude toward effect, 209-13; ethical standards under
evolution, 213-15, 219; evolution and belief in future life, 215,
216; and belief in God, 216-18, 229; and democracy, 223; evolution
and hell and heaven, 227, 228; fundamentalism, 232, 237, 282;
clerical harmonizing with evolution, 236; scientific harmonizing,
237-39; egocentric _versus_ ethnocentric, 239, 240; persistence, 240;
thirst for God, 285.

Renan, J. E., effect of evolution on, 241.

Research, element in scientific spirit, 250.

Revision, D.’s trait, 73, 118; element in scientific spirit, 255-57.

Royer-Collard, Paul, on facts, 44.

Ruskin, John, on vision of artists, 11.


St.-Hilaire, Auguste, and evolution, 85.

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., observation of humanity, 9, 267, 268; type, 54;
on absorption of interest, 128; and poetry, 148, 268; and scientific
spirit, 266-70; concreteness, 269; on Goethe, 271; pessimism and
sexual immorality, 272-74, 76.

Schelling, F. W. J. von, and evolution, 233.

Scherer, Edmond, on tolerance, 262; on man, 275.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, and evolution, 233.

Scientific spirit, motives of achievements, 96-101, 248, 249;
research, 250; industry, 251-53; patience, 253; caution, 254;
flexibility and impartiality, 255; lack of pedantry, 257-59; and
human nature, 259, 262; humility, 260; tolerance, 261; and pugnacity,
261; appreciation, 263; ardor, 264; illustrations: Sainte-Beuve,
266-70; Goethe, 270, 271; and spiritual blight, 272-76; inadequacy,
277; and instinctive action, 278, 279; reason as agent, 279; and
self-dissection, 279; and self-contradictions, 280; and unattainable
truth, 281-83; and ignorance and hope, 283-85. _See also_ Deduction;
Observation.

Scott, Sir Walter, industry, 252.

Sedgwick, Adam, and D., 205.

Self-dissection, as betrayal of scientific spirit, 279.

Sénancour, É. P. de, on nature, 153; self-dissection, 280.

Sexual selection, D.’s theory, 66, 67.

Shakespeare, William, vitality, 126; D.’s opinion, 147.

Shaw, G. B., and religion and evolution, 237.

Shelley, P. B., and nature, 152.

Sin, effect of evolution on belief, 231.

Slavery, D.’s antipathy, 134.

Smoking, D. and, 182.

Snuff, D.’s indulgence, 183.

Socialism, and evolution, 224.

Society, D. and, 173, 178.

Spencer, Herbert, and ‘survival of the fittest,’ 5, 91; D. on, 47,
78; type, 54; and universal evolution, 121, 219.

Spinoza, Baruch, type, 53.

Spiritualism, and evolution, 238.

Sport, D.’s attitude, 174-76.

Statement, accuracy, 22-24.

Stephen, Leslie, on D., 169.

Sterne, Laurence, on observation, 7; on doing, 277.

Study. _See_ Observation.

Survival of the fittest. Spencer’s term, 5, 91.

Sympathy, and observation, 34-38.

System, D. and, 30, 183.


Theater, D.’s attitude, 139.

Theology. _See_ Religion.

Thoreau, H. D., and observation of nature, 13; on knowledge as aid to
observation, 39; and deduction, 48.

Thrift, self-contradiction, 280.

Tolerance, D.’s trait, 79, 80; element in scientific spirit, 261-63.

Tolstoi, Leo, effect of evolution on, 241.

Torrey, Bradford, on observation, 8.

Truth, instinct as element in scientific spirit, 265, 275; Goethe’s
characteristic, 270; unattainable, 281-83; ignorance and hope,
283-85.

Turner, Sir William, on D. and information, 24.

Twain, Mark, effect of evolution on, 243.


Vivisection, D.’s attitude, 136.

Voltaire, and tolerance, 261; on study, 277.


Wallace, A. R., on collecting, 43; and D.’s sexual-selection theory,
66, 67; and presentation of evolutionary theory, 93, 94; relations
with D., 94, 95; and spiritualism, 238.

Water cure, D.’s subjection to, 181.

Wedgwood, Emma, Mrs. Darwin, 4.

Weisman, August, on deduction, 70; and evolution, 122, 218.

Wells, H. G., and religion and evolution, 237.

Westminster Abbey, D.’s tomb, 6.

White, Gilbert, and nature, 12.

Whitehead, A. N., on D.’s caution, 125; and evolution, 235, 246; on
scientific flexibility, 255.

Wiesner, Julius, courtesy, 262.

Wisdom, and knowledge, 44. _See also_ Deduction.

Wordsworth, William, and nature, 151.


Zola, Émile, as realist, 226, 241.




Transcriber’s Notes

pg 120 Changed: excuses any earlier undue insistance to: excuses any
earlier undue insistence

pg 241 Changed: Nietsche grew into the cloudy and colossal phantom
to: Nietzsche grew into the cloudy and colossal phantom

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