Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  This was one of the great eras of evangelical revival in the Church of England. John Henry Newman and his brother Francis – who had been taught mathematics at Ealing Grammar School by the father of Thomas H. Huxley – had become evangelicals before going up to Oxford. Jane Austen, three years before her death (which was in 1817), wrote to her sister Fanny, ‘I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest and safest.’25 The Evangelical Revival(s) – one adds a hesitant plural, for these revivals have been a feature of national Church life in England since the Reformation – received a particular boost at the beginning of the nineteenth century from a number of sources. One was the sense among many Christians that the Dissenters – Methodists, Baptists and others – made a more serious attempt to apply the principles of the Gospels to their daily lives than did some of the more worldly representatives of the Church of England, whose titular heads on earth were until 1820 George III, who was mad, and thereafter his dissolute and hugely unpopular son George IV. Another factor – again inspired by the thought of actually applying the Gospels to the realities of life – was the influence of those London evangelicals who came to be known as the Clapham Sect. It was a nickname given to them by the witty Sydney Smith, because so many of them attended the church on Clapham Common presided over by Parson Venn from 1792 to 1813. Many of the Clapham Sect would turn out to be the parents, uncles or grandparents of those who in later generations were famously non-evangelical, or actually irreligious. They were undoubtedly a formative group. Their earnestness, and their seriousness about trying to apply Christian values to the real world, led – particularly in the case of two of them, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce – to the most impressive achievement of the evangelical movement: the abolition of the Evil Trade, slavery. Others, such as Zachary Macaulay (father of Thomas Babington and a co-founder of London University), James Stephen (grandfather of Virginia Woolf) and Henry Thornton (great-grandfather of E. M. Forster), were part of an impressive cast-list who founded that intellectual dynasty, or intellectual aristocracy, of which Noel Annan wrote (see Chapter 2) and of which the Wedgwoods and the Darwins were also a part.

  When Jane Austen said that she was not convinced we ought not all to be evangelicals, she spoke, not – as perhaps later evangelicals, especially in America, might speak – of the evangelical appeal to the emotions, and the ‘conversion experience’, in which each individual believer gives heart and soul to the Lord. Rather, she said, there was Reason in wishing to act ‘more strictly up to the precepts of the New Testament’.26 The Duke of Wellington, at a similar date, would have agreed with her. When a friend raised an eyebrow at the Duke giving money to a missionary organization, he replied simply, ‘Orders are orders.’

  Another factor which perhaps contributed to the forceful attraction of evangelicalism when Darwin was growing to manhood was the aftermath of the French Revolution and its subsequent wars. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus could continue to espouse the values of 1789, to publish beautifully crafted verses which disposed of the necessity of a Creator, and to be a (somewhat self-satisfied) independent-minded intellectual. Christianity has thrived, in (relatively) modern times, not during periods of prosperity and indifference but when the alternative to Christianity is made glaringly obvious. During the Second World War in Britain, the contrast between the ‘Mere Christianity’ of C. S. Lewis’s radio broadcasts and the anti-human, anti-humanist genocides of the Communists and the Fascists on the continental mainland drew many to faith.

  Robespierre’s Terror, the wholesale demolition of cathedrals and churches, the torture and beheading of nuns and priests did not merely shock many in Britain. These horrors were seen to be the direct consequences of believing the kind of things which, in the palmy times of peace, Dr Erasmus Darwin had so freely discussed at dinners of the Lunar Men or at meetings of the Derby Philosophical Society. It was no wonder that his son Robert Waring had spoken little of his father’s ideas to his children; nor that Darwin’s sisters, like the Wedgwood girls of his generation, should have embraced evangelical Christianity, as practised in the Church of England. Emma Wedgwood was an especially devout girl. So, too, though, was her cousin, Darwin’s sister Caroline. When Bobby returned to Edinburgh to resume his medical studies in March 1826, she directly confronted him: ‘dear Charles I hope you read the bible & not only because you think it wrong not to read it, but with the wish of learning there what is necessary to feel & do to go to heaven after you die. I am sure I gain more by praying over a few verses than by reading simply – many chapters – I suppose you do not feel prepared yet to take the sacrament.’27

  This period of Darwin’s life – the very first when he was cast adrift from his family entirely, and where he found himself back in Scotland but without Ras – seems to be the only one in which he appears to have been seriously reflective about religion, though later, at Cambridge, he would make an intellectual commitment to orthodoxy. Clearly, when he was alone in Edinburgh, it began to dawn upon him how fully it was true that ‘all my recollections seem to be connected most with self’. He wrote to Caroline that her letter ‘makes me feel how very ungrateful I have been to you for all the kindness and trouble you took for me when I was a child. Indeed, I cannot help wondering at my own blind Ungratefulness. I have tried to follow your advice about the Bible, what part of the Bible do you like best? I like the Gospels. Do you know which of them is generally reckoned the best?’28 In spite of the twice-daily exposure to chapel prayers at Shrewsbury School, or perhaps because of it, Darwin writes with the airy ignorance of the Scriptures which is the norm in intellectual households.

  His return to Edinburgh, however, in the spring of 1826 would not in the event be devoted to Bible study. Alone for the first time in his life, and without the comfort-blanket of Ras to hang on to, the shy, gawky Darwin was now compelled, in his second year of medical study, to mix with students and teachers. He was about to be confronted with the scientific and philosophical questions which would engage him for the rest of his life, and with which his name would be forever associated.

  Without the companionship of Ras, Darwin joined the Plinian Natural History Society (named after the most famous natural historian of antiquity). It was here that there first became apparent that quality in Charles Darwin which perhaps his Uncle Jos had hitherto been alone in noticing: that he was ‘a man of enlarged curiosity’.29 From now onwards in the story, our hindsight inevitably outshines the myopia of Darwin’s father about the direction of Charles’s professional life and the uncertainties Darwin himself felt about his own future. The great intellectual journey had begun.

  Appropriately, in that geological phenomenon of ancient volcanic necks and sills – Edinburgh – geology was the branch of science which was dominant: in part, because Edinburgh was home to two of the most eminent and innovative geologists in the history of the subject. James Hutton, who had died in 1797, has a greater claim than Darwin to have changed the way in which the human race looks at the world. ‘He discovered an intangible thing against which the human mind had long armoured itself. He discovered, in other words, time – time boundless and without end, the time of the ancient Easterners – but in this case demonstrated by the very stones of the world, by the dust and clay over which the devout passed to their places of worship.’30

  It is not in the least clear, when the various authors of Scripture used phrases about time – such as the six ‘days’ of creation in Genesis, or the ‘forty years’ in which the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness, or the 969 ‘years’ of the patriarch of Methuselah – whether they were making any attempt to suggest mathematical measurements. Probably not. To a later age, however, when their words had been translated, from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, and read perhaps thousands of years after they were written down, the words appeared peculiar indeed. When not merely domestic clocks but nautical chronometers had been perfect
ed, the years of Methuselah must have seemed fantastic, not least because, slowly but inexorably since the Reformation, a habit had developed, especially in the Western world, of reading the Bible not as a series of types and allegories, but as a literal reality. So it was that when James Ussher (1581–1656) added up the years in the Bible he found that our world was of very short duration. Count back through the Hebrew Scriptures, through the generations of this king or patriarch begetting another, and you will find that human history began as recently as 4004 BC – the date when Eve made the interesting mistake of eating the apple. It was to be inferred, if you insisted upon taking this approach to the texts, that the six days of creation were also literal ‘days’ and that the world was therefore only about as old as the human race. Ussher was by the judgements of his contemporaries a learned and good man. Though an archbishop – not the Lord Protector’s favourite category of functionary – Ussher was given by Oliver Cromwell a state funeral in Westminster Abbey,31 so highly was he regarded.

  His legacy, however, would prove problematic to Christians. Measuring the poetic Hebrew time-scale with modern chronometers was going to force many an honest doubter into thinking the unthinkable: namely that the Bible, the inspired word of God, could not possibly be true.

  James Hutton saw that the earth was not a finished creation, but a geological phenomenon in a state of constant change. The dynamic forces in the crust of the earth created tensions and strains which in the course of time threw up new lands from the ocean bed. ‘Thus . . . from the top of the mountain to the shore of the sea . . . everything is in a state of change; the rock and solid strata slowly dissolving, breaking and decomposing for the purpose of becoming soil; the soil travelling along the surface of the earth on its way to the shore; and the shore itself wearing and wasting by the agitation of the sea, an agitation which is essential to the purposes of the living world.’32

  In Hutton’s lifetime, geology, as studied in Europe, was explained by what has been called ‘catastrophism’. That is to say that observed geological phenomena have come about as a result of some departure from an harmonious ‘norm’ of stillness. Broadly speaking, the catastrophists fell into two camps. The first was represented by Abraham Werner, the ‘father of German geology’.33 This theory, called Neptunist after the Roman god of the sea, supposed that the stratification of the earth’s crust had come about as the result of a turbulent universal sea which had once covered the entire surface of the planet. The convenience of this viewpoint was that it was compatible with the Bible’s story of Noah’s flood. Opposed to the Neptunists, the Plutonists or Vulcanists were those who questioned whether all geological change took place under a great sea. This view posited the possibility that there could have been a series of worldwide catastrophes, which accounted, for example, for the fossil-bearing strata in which the constituents of life were discernible. These life-forms, revealed in the fossils, showed species which had become extinct. This was compatible with a literalist view of Genesis because the Vulcanist/Plutonist school could contort their minds into believing that after each catastrophe the Creator brought new species into being to replace the ones which had been fossilized. This, the Vulcanist viewpoint, was most conspicuously associated in Europe with Baron Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) of Stuttgart, one of the great pioneers (as we have already seen in Chapter 1) of the museum as the fundamental means of scientific inquiry. He was a prodigious palaeontologist with an unrivalled knowledge of molluscs and fish – he identified 5,000 species of fish in his Histoire naturelle des poissons – and hugely enriched the collections in Paris, for which he was promoted by Napoleon and ennobled by King Louis Philippe.

  These two catastrophist views – Vulcanist versus Neptunist – were the geological orthodoxy in Oxford and Cambridge when Darwin was young. It was so in Edinburgh too. But Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795) had really made the debate redundant, and paved the way for modern geology and the work of Charles Lyell which would so change scientific thinking, not only about geology but about biology and the origin of species. Some of Hutton’s mind-changing discoveries – such as that the earth, ‘like the body of an animal, is wasted at the same time that it is repaired’ – had been made in Edinburgh itself. It was in Salisbury Crags that he saw that the ‘dykes’ had once been molten, and had been intruded into the sill long after the sill itself had cooled. It was possible actually to see how the heat of the molten lava had altered the adjacent rocks. Hutton had not discovered the whole of modern geology, but he was closer to recognizing the reality of our planet, with semi-molten rocks churning ominously only a little beneath the fragile surface of the earth, than any of his contemporaries. And he had changed the human perception of time itself.34

  Edinburgh was without doubt a good place to be for a budding young scientist. Since Hutton’s death, the most outstanding geologist there was Robert Jameson, Professor of Natural History from 1805 to 1844 and whose lectures on both geology and zoology Darwin attended. ‘The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology or in any way to study the science,’ he recalled in his Autobiography.35 This was because Jameson was a dry-as-dust scholar, not because the material was itself uninteresting. Asa Gray, the American scientist who was one of the earliest to espouse Darwinism, also studied under Jameson at Edinburgh and found him an ‘old dry brown stick’.36

  In fact, Darwin absorbed the geological debate avidly. The only ‘professional position’ – one could not exactly call it a job – which he would ever take up was the secretaryship of the Geological Society of London when he returned from the voyage of the Beagle, and one can tell, from the speed with which he began to study geology on that voyage, that his time at Edinburgh had not been wasted. He was attentive at the course of a hundred lectures given by Jameson in his great creation, the Natural History Museum, with its synoptic displays of insects, birds, fish, minerals and rock types. Jameson’s collection at the Natural History Museum was the largest in Europe. His manner of delivery might have been dull but his range was staggering, and it is not surprising that Darwin attended so faithfully. His course consisted of some hundred lectures, five days a week, beginning with ‘the natural history of man’ and, having spread over the broad range of taxonomy, ending with reflections on ‘The Philosophy of Zoology’. No course of this kind was available to students at English universities and it is clear, from all Darwin’s subsequent development, that these lectures of Jameson’s were the foundation of his life’s work. It was from Jameson’s lectures that Darwin would learn breadth. The great question to which he would devote the bulk of his professional life, and the theory which still bears his name, depended upon Darwin swimming in and out of scientific disciplines, mastering (whatever he claims jokingly in his Autobiography) geology, as well as palaeontology, and a detailed knowledge of zoology. It was observed, by Sir Alexander Grant, that Jameson ‘used to finish up with lectures on the origins of species of Animals!’37 (Grant, Principal of the University, 1868–84, was the author of the substantial The Story of the University of Edinburgh during its First Three Hundred Years, 1884.)

  Jameson was primarily responsible for introducing to his students the new wave of scientific thinking which had come from France. Darwin would never have heard about this if he had gone straight from school to Cambridge. It was Jameson who founded and ran the natural history museum in Edinburgh; Jameson who founded and edited the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal and who, in that periodical, almost certainly expounded the new continental ideas of Étienne Geoffory Saint-Hilaire, Georges Cuvier and Lamarck. It was almost certainly Jameson who wrote an obituary of Giambattista Brocchi. Niles Eldredge, doyen of modern evolutionary palaeontology, in a recent book about Darwin’s early influences, comments on the appropriateness of the name John the Baptist for two of the most influential early believers in evolution: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Giambattista Brocchi.38 They shared ‘the distinction of being the first to develop natural causal explanation
s of the origins of modern species that were both empirically and phylogenetically based’.39 Both based their ideas on research into fossils. In many ways, Brocchi was the more revolutionary, the closer to what we can now see must be something like the truth. Whereas Lamarck, studying sixty-five-million-year-old Cenozoic fossils, concluded that there was a continuity of species which slowly changed and intergraded into other species of the same genus, Brocchi was more radical. He believed that species have births, histories and then deaths. Species die out, just as individuals do. Old species do not change into descendants; they give birth to new species, rather as individuals sire new offspring. Eldredge points out the supreme irony that Darwin, in his developed theory of evolution (from 1844 onwards), accepted that Lamarck’s picture of the pattern of evolution was the right one, even though he departed from Lamarck in his idea of how these changes take place. Namely, he believed, as Lamarck did, that species intergrade, almost imperceptibly, into descendants. However, as Eldredge points out, the fossil evidence indicates almost the opposite being the case. ‘When the fossil evidence seems to say the opposite, Darwin decided the fossil record itself was at fault.’40 Lamarck, and later Darwin, propounded the idea that species evolve transformationally; Brocchi thought ‘taxically’.