Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley Part 7

R. B. Martin at Westminster Abbey, not merely as giving sanction to the same as an individual, but appearing as one of the deputation from a Society which has especially become the indorser and sustainer of Mr. Darwin's theories.

---- & Co.

The accordance of a resting-place to Darwin's remains among England's ill.u.s.trious dead in that Valhalla, was an irenicon from Theology to one whose theories, pushed to their logical issues, have done more than any other to undermine the supernatural a.s.sumptions on which it is built.

Not that Darwin was a man of aggressive type. If he speaks on the high matters round which, like planet tethered to sun, the spirit of man revolves by irresistible attraction, it is with hesitating voice and with no deep emotion. A man of placid temper, in whom the observing faculties were stronger than the reflective, he was content to collect and co-ordinate facts, leaving to others the work of pointing out their significance, and adjusting them, as best they could, to this or that theory. It would be unjust to say of him what John Morley says of Voltaire, that "he had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice," but we know from his own confessions, what limitations hemmed in his emotional nature. The Life and Letters tells us that he was glad, after the more serious work and correspondence of the day were over, to listen to novels, for which he had a great love so long as they ended happily, and contained "some person whom one can thoroughly love, if a pretty woman, so much the better." But strangely enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, and poetry after thirty. When at school he enjoyed Thomson, Byron, and Scott; Sh.e.l.ley gave him intense delight, and he was fond of Shakespeare, especially the historical plays; but in his old age he found him "so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they did. 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 organised or better const.i.tuted 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 and 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. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

It is often said that a man's religion concerns himself only. So far as the value of the majority of people's opinions on such high matters goes, this is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to men whose words carry weight, or whose discoveries cause us to ask what is their bearing on the larger questions of human relations and destinies to which past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy us, or that are not compatible with the facts discovered. Whatever silence Darwin maintained in his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent readers would see that unaggressive as was the mode of presentments of his theory, it undermined current beliefs in special providence, with its special creations and contrivances, and therefore in the intermittent interference of a deity; thus excluding that supernatural action of which miracles are the decaying stock evidence.

Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of natural selection by "descent with modification" was to apply to the human species. And when Darwin, already antic.i.p.ated in this application by his more daring disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, published his Descent of Man, with its outspoken chapter on the origin of conscience and the development of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was obvious that the bottom was knocked out of all traditional dogmas of man's fall and redemption, of human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what Darwin himself believed was a matter of moment. His answers to inquiries which were made public during his lifetime told us that while the varying circ.u.mstances and modes of life caused his judgment to often fluctuate, and that while he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a G.o.d, "I think," he says, "that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." The chapter on Religion, although a part of the autobiography, is printed separately in the Life and Letters. As the following quotation shows, it is interesting as detailing a few of the steps by which Darwin reached that suspensive stage.

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this time--i. e., 1836 to 1839--to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question, then, continually rose before my mind, and would not be banished--is it credible that if G.o.d were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This appeared to me utterly incredible.

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported--and that the more we know of the fixed laws of Nature the more incredible do miracles become--that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, that the Gospels can not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seems to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses: by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me.

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and ma.n.u.scripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal G.o.d until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve sh.e.l.l must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.

Without doubt, the influence of the conclusions deducible from the theory of Evolution are fatal to belief in the supernatural. When we say the supernatural, we mean that great body of a.s.sumptions out of which are constructed all theologies, the essential element in these being the intimate relation between spiritual beings, of whom certain qualities are predicated, and man. These beings have no longer any place in the effective belief of intelligent and unprejudiced men, because they are found to have no correspondence with the ascertained operations of Nature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Herbert Spencer]

2. _Herbert Spencer._

Contact with many "sorts and conditions of men" brings home the need of ceaselessly dinning into their ears the fact that _Darwin's theory deals only with the evolution of plants and animals from a common ancestry.

It is not concerned with the origin of life itself, nor with those conditions preceding life which are covered by the general term_, Inorganic Evolution. Therefore, it forms but a very small part of the general theory of the origin of the earth and other bodies, "as the sand by the seash.o.r.e innumerable," that fill the infinite s.p.a.ces.

We have seen that speculation about the universe had its rise in Ionia.

After centuries of discouragement, prohibition, and, sometimes, actual persecution, it was revived, to advance, without further serious arrest, some three hundred years ago. A survey of the history of philosophies of the origin of the cosmos from the time of the renascence of inquiry, shows that the great Immanuel Kant has not had his due. As remarked already, he appears to have been the first to put into shape what is known as the nebular theory. In his General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or an Attempt to Account for the Const.i.tution and the Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles, published in 1775, he "pictures to himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development.

In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what is gained at the margin is lost in the centre; the attractions of the central systems bring their const.i.tuents together, which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are lie between the ruins of the worlds that have been and the chaotic materials of the worlds that shall be; and in spite of all waste and destruction, Cosmos is extending his borders at the expense of Chaos."

Kant's speculations were confirmed by the celebrated mathematician, Laplace. He showed that the "rings" rotate in the same direction as the central body from which they were cast off; sun, planets, and moons (those of Ura.n.u.s excepted) moving in a common direction, and almost in the same plane. The probability that these harmonious movements are the effects of like causes he calculated as 200,000 billions to one.

The observations of the famous astronomer, Sir William Herschel, which resulted in the discovery of binary or double stars, of star-cl.u.s.ters, and cloud-like nebulae (as that term implies) were further confirmations of Kant's theory. And such modifications in this as have been made by subsequent advance in knowledge, notably by the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy (the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace being based on gravitation alone), affect not the general theory of the origin of the heavenly bodies from seemingly formless, unstable, and highly-diffused matter. The a.s.sumption of primitive unstableness and unlikeness squares with the unequal distribution of matter; with the movements of its ma.s.ses in different directions, and at different rates; and with the ceaseless redistribution of matter and motion. For all changes of states are due to the rearrangement of the atoms of which matter is made up, resulting in the evolution of the seeming like into the actual unlike; of the simple into the more and more complex, till--speaking of the only planet of whose life-history we can have knowledge--with the cooling of the earth to a temperature permitting of the evolution of living matter, the highest complexity is reached in the infinitely diverse forms of plants and animals. Therefore, as our knowledge of matter is limited to the changes of which we a.s.sume it to be the vehicle, it would seem that science reduces the Universe to the intelligible concept of Motion.

Since the great discovery by Kirchoff, in 1859, of the meaning of the dark lines that cross the refracted sun-rays, the spectroscope has come as powerful evidence in support of the nebular theory, while the photographic plate is a scarcely less important witness. The one has demonstrated that many nebulae, once thought to be star-cl.u.s.ters, are ma.s.ses of glowing hydrogen and nitrogen gases; that, to quote the striking communication made by the highest authority on the subject, Dr.

Huggins, in his Presidential Address to the British a.s.sociation, 1891, "in the part of the heavens within our ken, the stars still in the early and middle stages of evolution exceed greatly in number those which appear to be in an advanced condition of condensation." The other, recording infallible vibrations on a sensitive plate, and securing accurate registration of the impressions, reveals, as in Dr. Roberts's grand photograph of the nebula in Andromeda, a central ma.s.s round which are distinct rings of luminous matter, these being separated from the main body by dark rifts or s.p.a.ces. To quote Dr. Huggins once more, "We seem to have presented to us some stage of cosmical Evolution on a gigantic scale."

The great fact that lies at the back of all these confirmations of the nebular theory is the fundamental ident.i.ty of the stuff of which the universe is made; a fact which entered into the prevision of the Ionian cosmologists. Dr. Huggins says that "if the whole earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very closely the solar spectrum."

In referring to this, there may be carrying of "owls to Athens," but that re-statements may sometimes be needful has ill.u.s.tration in Lord Salisbury's Presidential Address to the British a.s.sociation, 1894, wherein the a.s.sumed absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the sun's spectrum is adduced as an argument against the theory of the common origin of the bodies of the solar system. Speaking of the predominant proportion of oxygen in the solid and liquid substances of the earth, and of the predominance of nitrogen in our atmosphere, his lordship asked, "if the earth be a detached bit whisked off the ma.s.s of the sun, as cosmogonists love to tell us, how comes it that, in leaving the sun, we cleaned him out so completely of his nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of these gases remains behind to be discovered even by the searching vision of the spectroscope?" If Lord Salisbury had consulted Dr. Huggins, or some foreign astronomer of equal rank, as Duner or Scheiner, he would not have put a question exposing his ignorance, and unmasking his prejudice.

These authorities would have told him that when a mixture of the incandescent vapours of the metals and metalloids (or non-metallic elementary substances, to which cla.s.s both oxygen and nitrogen belong), or their compounds, is examined with the spectroscope, the spectra of the metalloids always yield before that of the metals. Hence the absence of the lines of oxygen and other metalloids, carbon and silicon excepted, among the vast crowd of lines in the solar spectrum. Then, too, in extreme states of rarefaction of the sun's absorbing layer, the absorption of the oxygen is too small to be sensible to us.

"While the genesis of the Solar System, and of countless other systems like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery continues as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved: it is simply removed further back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery.

Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. The ingenious artisan, able as some have been so far to imitate vitality as to produce a mechanical pianoforte player, may in some sort conceive how, by greater skill, a complete man might be artificially produced; but he is unable to conceive how such a complex organism gradually arises out of a minute structureless germ. That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffuse matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical G.o.d of Paley'

as does the fetish of the savage."

This quotation is from an essay on the Nebular Hypothesis, which appeared in the Westminster Review of July, 1858, and which must, therefore, have been written before the eventful date of the reading of Darwin and Wallace's memorable paper before the Linnaean Society.

The author of that essay is Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the foregoing extract from it may fitly preface a brief account of his life-work in co-ordinating the manifold branches of knowledge into a synthetic whole.

In erecting a complete theory of Evolution on a purely scientific basis "his profound and vigorous writings," to quote Huxley, "embody the spirit of Descartes in the knowledge of our own day." Laying the foundation of his ma.s.sive structure in early manhood, Mr. Spencer has had the rare satisfaction of placing the topmost stone on the building which his brain devised and his hand upreared. While the sheets of this little book are being pa.s.sed for press, there arrives the third volume of the Principles of Sociology, which completes Mr. Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. In the preface to this, the venerable author says:

"On looking back over the six-and-thirty years which I have pa.s.sed since the Synthetic Philosophy was commenced, I am surprised at my audacity in undertaking it, and still more surprised by its completion. In 1860 my small resources had been nearly all frittered away in writing and publishing books which did not repay their expenses; and I was suffering under a chronic disorder, caused by overtax of brain in 1855, which, wholly disabling me for eighteen months, thereafter limited my work to three hours a day, and usually to less. How insane my project must have seemed to onlookers, may be judged from the fact that before the first chapter of the first volume was finished, one of my nervous breakdowns obliged me to desist.

"But imprudent courses do not always fail. Sometimes a forlorn hope is justified by the event. Though, along with other deterrents, many relapses, now lasting for weeks, now for months, and once for years, often made me despair of reaching the end, yet at length the end is reached. Doubtless in earlier years some exultation would have resulted; but as age creeps on feelings weaken, and now my chief pleasure is in my emanc.i.p.ation. Still there is satisfaction in the consciousness that losses, discouragements, and shattered health have not prevented me from fulfilling the purpose of my life."

These words recall a parallel invited by Gibbon's record of his feelings on the completion of his immortal work, when walking under the acacias of his garden at Lausanne, he pondered on the "recovery of his freedom, and perhaps the establishment of his fame," but with a "sober melancholy" at the thought that "he had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion."

HERBERT SPENCER, spiritual descendant--_longo intervallo_--of Herac.l.i.tus and Lucretius, was born at Derby on the 27th of April, 1820. His father was a schoolmaster; a man of scientific tastes, and, it is interesting to note, secretary of the Derby Philosophical a.s.sociation founded by Erasmus Darwin. In Mr. Spencer's book on Education there are hints of his inheritance of the father's bent as an observer and lover of Nature in the remark that, "whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can a.s.sume." He was articled in his seventeenth year to a railway engineer, and followed that profession until he was twenty-five. During this period he wrote various papers for the Civil Engineers' and Architects' Journal, and, what is of importance to note, a series of letters to the Nonconformist in 1842 on The Proper Sphere of Government (republished as a pamphlet in 1844), in which "the only point of community with the general doctrine of Evolution is a belief in the modifiability of human nature through adaptation to conditions, and a consequent belief in human progression." After giving up engineering, Mr. Spencer joined the staff of the Economist, and while thus employed, published, in 1850, his first important book, Social Statics, or the Conditions essential to Human Happiness specified, and the first of them developed. In a footnote to the later editions of this work Mr.

Spencer points out a brace of paragraphs in the chapter on General Considerations in which "may be seen the first step toward the general doctrine of Evolution. After referring to the a.n.a.logy between the subdivision of labour, which goes on in human society as it advances; and the gradual diminution in the number of like parts and the multiplication of unlike parts which are observable in the higher animals; Mr. Spencer says:

"Now, just the same coalescence of like parts and separation of unlike ones--just the same increasing subdivision of function--takes place in the development of society. The earliest social organisms consist almost wholly of repet.i.tions of one element. Every man is a warrior, hunter, fisherman, builder, agriculturist, toolmaker. Each portion of the community performs the same duties with every other portion; much as each slice of the polyp's body is alike stomach, muscle, skin, and lungs. Even the chiefs, in whom a tendency towards separateness of function first appears, still retain their similarity to the rest in economic respects. The next stage is distinguished by a segregation of these social units into a few distinct cla.s.ses--warriors, priests, and slaves. A further advance is seen in the sundering of the labourers into different castes, having special occupations, as among the Hindoos. And, without further ill.u.s.tration, the reader will at once perceive, that from these inferior types of society up to our own complicated and more perfect one, the progress has ever been of the same nature. While he will also perceive that this coalescence of like parts, as seen in the concentration of particular manufactures in particular districts, and this separation of agents having separate functions, as seen in the more and more minute division of labour, are still going on.

"Thus do we find, not only that the a.n.a.logy between a society and a living creature is borne out to a degree quite unsuspected by those who commonly draw it, but also that the same definition of life applies to both. This union of many men into one community--this increasing mutual dependence of units which were originally independent--this formation of a whole consisting of unlike parts--this growth of an organism, of which one portion cannot be injured without the rest feeling it--may all be generalized under the law of individuation. The development of society, as well as the development of man and the development of life generally, may be described as a tendency to individuate--_to become a thing_. And rightly interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us are uniformly significant of this tendency."

_h.o.m.o sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto_: "I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me." This oft-quoted saying of the old farmer in the Self-Tormentor of Terence might be affixed as motto to Herbert Spencer's writings from the tractate on the Proper Sphere of Government to the concluding volume of the Principles of Sociology. For thought of human interests everywhere pervades them; social and ethical questions are kept in the van throughout. Philosophy is brought from her high seat to mix in the sweet amenities of home, in the discipline of camp, in the rivalry of market; and linked to conduct. Conduct is defined as "acts adjusted to ends," the perfecting of the adjustment being the highest aim, so that "the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow-men" is secured, the limit of evolution of conduct not being reached, "until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others."

Emerson puts this ideal into crisp form when he speaks of the time in which a man shall care more that he wrongs not his neighbour than that his neighbour wrongs him; then will his "market-cart become a chariot of the sun."

That humanity is the pivot round which Mr. Spencer's philosophic system revolves is seen in the earliest Essays, and notably in his making mental evolution the subject of the first instalment of his Synthetic Philosophy. For, in the Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, he limits feeling or consciousness to animals possessing a nervous system, and traces its beginnings in the "blurred, undetermined feeling answering to a single pulsation or shock" (as for example, to go no lower down the life-scale, in the medusa or jelly-fish), to its highest form as self-consciousness, or knowing that we know, in man. This dominant element in Mr. Spencer's philosophy secures it a life and permanence which, had it been restricted to explaining the mechanics of the inorganic universe, it could never have possessed. It has been observed how the Darwinian theory aroused attention in all quarters because it touched human interests on every side. And, although less obvious to the mult.i.tude, the Synthetic Philosophy, dealing with all cosmic processes as purely mechanical problems, interprets "the phenomena of life (excluding the question of its origin), mind, and society, in terms of matter and motion." Antic.i.p.ating the levelling of epithets against such apparent materializing of mental phenomena involved in that method, Spencer remarks on the dismay with which men, who have not risen above the vulgar conception which unites with matter the contemptuous epithets "gross" and "brute," regard the proposal to reduce the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a level which they think so degraded. "Whoever remembers that the forms of existence which the uncultivated speak of with so much scorn, are shown by the man of science to be the more marvellous in their attributes the more they are investigated, and are also proved to be in their ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible--as absolutely incomprehensible as sensation, or the conscious something which perceives it--whoever clearly recognises this truth, will see that the course proposed does not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, but an elevation of the so-called lower. Perceiving, as he will, that the Materialist and Spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words,--in which the disputants are equally absurd, each thinking that he understands that which it is impossible for any man to understand,--he will perceive how utterly groundless is the fear referred to. Being fully convinced that no matter what nomenclature is used, the ultimate mystery must remain the same, he will be as ready to formulate all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force, as in any other terms; and will rather indeed antic.i.p.ate, that only in a doctrine which recognises the Unknown Cause as co-extensive with all orders of phenomena, can there be a consistent Religion, or a consistent Philosophy."

This is clear enough; yet such is the cra.s.s density of some objectors that eighteen years after the above was written, Mr. Spencer, in answering criticisms on First Principles, had to rebut the charge that he believed matter to consist of "s.p.a.ce-occupying units, having shape and measurement."

The Principles of Psychology was both preceded and followed by a series of essays in which the process of change from the "h.o.m.ogeneous to the heterogeneous," i. e., from the seeming like to the actual unlike, was expounded. Mr. Spencer tells us that in 1852 he first became acquainted with Von Baer's Law of Development, or the changes undergone in each living thing, from the general to the special, during its advance from the embryonic to the fully-formed state. That law confirmed the prevision indicated in the pa.s.sages quoted above from Social Statics, and impressed him as one of the three doctrines which are indispensable elements of the general theory of Evolution. The other two are the Correlation of the Physical Forces, or the transformation of different modes of motion into other modes of motion, as of heat or light into electricity, and so forth, in Proteus-like fashion; and the Conservation of Energy, or the indestructibility of matter and motion, whatever changes or transformations these may undergo.

In permitting the quotation of the useful abstract of the Synthetic Philosophy which, originally drawn up for the late Professor Youmans, was imbodied in a letter to the Athenaeum of 22d of July, 1882, Mr.

Spencer was good enough to volunteer the following details to the writer:--

"You are probably aware that the conception set forth in that abstract was reached by slow steps during many years. These steps occurred as follows:--

1850. Social Statics: especially chapter General Considerations.

(Higher human Evolution.)

1852. March. Development Hypothesis, in the Leader. (Evolution of species, _vid. ante_, p. 111.)

1852. April. Theory of Population, etc., in Westminster Review.

(Higher human Evolution.)

1854. July. The Genesis of Science in British Quarterly Review.

(Intellectual Evolution.)

1855. July. Principles of Psychology. (Mental Evolution in general.)

1857. April. Progress: its Law and Cause: Westminster Review.

(Evolution at large.)

1857. April. Ultimate Laws of Physiology. National Review. (Another factor of Evolution at large.)

"From these last two Essays came the inception of the Synthetic Philosophy. The first programme of it was drawn up in January, 1858." ...