by A. N. Wilson
In other words, the Germans, rightly, saw Darwinism less as a purely scientific hypothesis and more as a world-outlook, a way of being modern, a way of reordering society in the wake of rapid industrialization, urban growth, family size and structure, and sexuality. Racial hygiene was a key ingredient in this from early days. (The phrase was coined not by Haeckel but by Alfred Ploetz, but it exactly echoed Haeckel’s views.)95
Haeckel read Darwin in the German translation of H. G. Bronn. Although considered in his own time to be a great scientist, it is probably fair to say that, today, ‘historians of science find him of more interest than biologists do’.96 Haeckel was not a proto-Nazi. In fact, the actual Nazis dismissed his philosophy as ‘a direct violation of Nazi völkisch commitments’.97 Nevertheless, it remains hard to read his reflections on race without the toes curling.
Darwin believed that Haeckel was ‘one of the few who clearly understands Natural Selection’.98 Haeckel had come to England in 1866, at the invitation of Huxley, to attend the British Association for the Advancement of Science, convening in that year at Nottingham. While in England, he took the opportunity of visiting Lyell in London, and, of course, he made the Haj to Down House.
As the coach pulled up to Darwin’s ivy-covered country house, shaded by elms, out of the shadows of the vine-covered entrance came the great scientist himself to meet me. He had a tall, worthy form with the broad shoulders of Atlas, who carries a world of thought. He had a Jupiter-like forehead, high and broadly domed, similar to Goethe’s, and with deep furrows from the habit of mental work. His eyes were the friendliest and kindest, beshadowed by the roof of a protruding brow. His sensitive mouth was surrounded by a great silver-white full beard. The welcoming warm expression of his whole face, the quiet and soft voice, the slow and thoughtful speech, the natural and open flow of ideas in conversation – all of this captured my whole heart during the first hours of our discussion. It was similar to the way his great book on first reading had earlier conquered my understanding by storm. I believed I had before me the kind of noble worldly wisdom of the Greek ancients, that of a Socrates or an Aristotle.99
Etty took a more satirical view of the visit, noting that the shy Jena professor, ‘one of Papa’s most thoroughgoing disciples’, was ‘so agitated he forgot all the little English he knew, & he & Papa shook hands repeatedly . . . Talking of dining in London – “I like a good bit of flesh at a restoration.”’100
For Haeckel, Darwin’s theory was something much more than a scientific hypothesis. It was a vision of life itself. Haeckel had lost a beloved wife, Anna. Even before this tragedy, he had written, in 1863, ‘I am now convinced that a great future lies before this theory, and that it will slowly but surely loose us from the bonds of a great and far-reaching prejudice. For this reason I shall dedicate my whole life and efforts to it.’ When Anna died as a young woman, of what appears to have been a combination of pleurisy and appendicitis, Haeckel embraced the pitilessly tragic quality of the Darwinian theory as a spiritual credo, colouring it with the emotional tones of German Romanticism. Darwin in fact bore no resemblance to Goethe, but it was revealing that Haeckel, on his visit to Down, believed that he did. For Haeckel, eternal life meant life on earth, ‘nature, an eternal life, becoming and movement’. Darwin’s evolution and Goethe’s becoming (Werdend) fused in Haeckel’s passionate soul. In the Evolution of Man he stated, ‘All my readers know of the very important scientific movement which Charles Darwin caused fifteen years ago, by this book The Origin of Species. The most important direct consequence of this work, which marks a fresh epoch, has been to cause new inquiries to be made into the origin of the human race, which have proved the natural evolution of man through lower animal forms.’101
In his defence of Darwin from his lecture podium at Jena, Haeckel – even before The Descent of Man had been published – saw Darwinism as a law of progress (Gesetz von Fortschritts).102 He believed one saw the processes of natural selection and the struggle of existence at work in societies and in human history. On one level, those scientists of our own day who believe that Haeckel misinterpreted the Master in certain scientific details are only addressing the scarcely relevant question of what is factually true. Haeckel, of course, believed that Darwin’s theory would be borne out by the facts. Inspired by Haeckel, Eugène Dubois (1858–1920) would set out to Java and discover what he believed to be the Missing Link, Pithecanthropus erectus, the earliest ape-man. The authenticity or otherwise of the bones discovered by Dubois (some scientists claimed the Missing Link’s skull cap had come from an ape and the femur from a human being)103 was beside the point – of no more capacity to dislodge the Darwinian faith than a sceptical dating of the Turin Shroud or a Relic of the True Cross. Haeckel, more eloquent and more Romantic than many of his generation, had found in Darwinism a new religion. Richard Goldschmidt, the great Berlin geneticist who migrated from Germany to Berkeley in the 1930s, recalled reading Haeckel as an adolescent.
I found Haeckel’s history of creation one day and read it with burning eyes and soul. It seemed that all problems of heaven and earth were solved simply and convincingly; there was an answer to every question which troubled the young mind. Evolution was the key to everything and could replace all the beliefs and creeds which one was discarding. There were no creation, no God, no heaven and hell, only evolution and the wonderful law of recapitulation which demonstrated the fact of evolution to the most stubborn believer in creation.104
(The law of recapitulation, now largely disbelieved, was Haeckel’s refinement of Darwinism: namely that an embryo, through the process from fertilization to gestation, goes through all the stages of evolution of its remote ancestors.)
Darwin, too, in his quiet way, saw his theory as an alternative religion which put paid to Christianity. His natural diffidence, however, would have made him shrink from making any such public declarations on the subject as Haeckel’s. Speaking to the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians shortly after Darwin’s death in 1882, Haeckel saw Darwin as in essence an anti-religious figure who had bravely hacked through the jungle of religiously overgrown biology following in the footsteps of great Germans – Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Kant. Just as Martin Luther who, ‘with a mighty hand tore asunder the web of lies by the world-dominating papacy, so in our day, Charles Darwin, with comparable overpowering might, has destroyed the ruling error doctrines of the mystical creation dogma and through his reform of developmental theory has elevated the whole sensibility, thought, and will of mankind on to a higher plane’.105
He went on to quote a private letter which Darwin had sent to a young Russian nobleman, Nicolai Aleksandrovich Mengden, who had written to Darwin about the theological difficulties aroused in his mind by the evolutionary theory. Darwin had replied, ‘I am much engaged, an old man, and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully – nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to do with Christ . . . For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation.’106
There are one or two other examples of Darwin’s candour in this matter, as he grew older, in letters to total strangers. With Emma, though not with his children and his intimates, he continued to fudge the issue – anything for a quiet life. Yet, though Haeckel’s full-blown Romanticism was not Darwin’s style, in belief, the two men were as one.
15
Immense Generalizations
WHEN LORD SALISBURY became Chancellor of Oxford University, in succession to the 14th Earl of Derby, it was in his gift to nominate the honorary doctors for the first year of his office (1870). He nominated Darwin, Huxley and John Tyndall, superintendent of the Royal Institution and one of the great men of science of his day. Dr E. B. Pusey, the noted Arabist and diehard chieftain of the High Church party, objected, but Salisbury was firm. He shared Pusey’s religious convictions, but believed that ‘it is not desirable that the Church and those who represent her should condemn scientific speculations when they are only inferentially and
not avowedly hostile to religion’.1
In the end, in deference to the Puseyite scruples, Huxley’s name was removed from the list of honorands, but Salisbury, as so often, was being quite cunning. No doubt he genuinely admired Darwin’s industry and range; but in conferring upon him an honorary doctorate (of Civil Law) he was publicly declaring that the Church of England could withstand the winds of Darwinism very easily. Besides, Darwin was by way of being a kinsman of Salisbury’s wife – Georgina Drewe, daughter of Caroline Allen of Cresselly, having married Sir Edward Alderson; among their issue was a daughter, Georgina, later Lady Salisbury. Oxford – which since the 1860 debate between Huxley and Soapy Sam had been synonymous in some minds with antiscientific reactionism – could now be seen as bestowing blessings upon scientific research. Darwin, for his part, was happy to be a member of the Establishment. As it happened, the degree was a purely notional honour. It was impossible to award honorary degrees in absentia; and Darwin was, of course, too ill to make the journey to Oxford to take part in a ceremony.2
Meanwhile, with The Descent of Man complete and published, Darwin was at work on his final and most popular, evolutionary text, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Work had progressed slowly. The burden of Darwin’s correspondence was enormous. (The volumes of the Cambridge edition covering the years 1871–3, when he was finishing Expression and revising Descent, occupy over 2,400 printed pages.) He was more than usually tired, and beset by his symptoms. Aged only sixty-two he could write, ‘I feel as old as Methuselah.’3
Darwin was one of the great accumulators of evidence, collector of examples. If he belonged to a category of literary history it would be with the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, or with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, those bulging compilations of information, quotation and cross-reference. The best bits of Darwin’s book on the expression of the emotions consist of anecdotage. One can imagine, when reading them, why his friends and family record him as a charming man, within his circle of intimates, and a good talker.
Horses scratch themselves by nibbling those parts of their bodies which they can reach with their teeth; but more commonly one horse shows another where he wants to be scratched, and they then nibble each other. A friend whose attention I called to the subject, observed that when he rubbed his horse’s neck, the animal protruded his head, uncovered his teeth, and moved his jaws, exactly as if he were nibbling another horse’s neck, for he could never have nibbled his own neck . . .4
‘Let us now suppose that the dog suddenly discovers that the man whom he is approaching, is not a stranger, but his master; and let it be observed how completely and instantaneously his whole bearing is reversed . . .’5 (He wrote more tenderly about dogs than about any other species.) Some of the observations seem almost seventeenth century in their quirkiness: ‘The whole body of the hippopotamus . . . was covered with red-coloured perspiration whilst giving birth to her young. So it is with extreme fear; the same veterinary has often seen horses sweating from this cause; as has Mr Bartlett with the rhinoceros; and with man it is a well-known symptom.’6
The book is both a wonderful treasure-house of detail – barn owls swelling their plumage and hissing in anger, lizards extending their throat pouches for the same reason and erecting their dorsal crest, expressions they also demonstrate during courtship, snakes and chameleons inflating themselves when irritated, cats arching their backs in terror – and a work of ideology, for he wished to remind his readers every few pages that all species, including the human race, were loosely related. The human passages are richly enjoyable, particularly the evidence of the insane, supplied by the psychiatrist Dr James Crichton-Browne, who ran the Wakefield Asylum in Yorkshire. ‘I have been making immense use almost every day of your manuscript,’ Darwin wrote to Crichton-Browne. He used the psychiatrist’s written evidence, but tenderly eschewed the photographic, with the exception of a woodcut of a madwoman’s hair bristling like that of a frightened animal.
The effect of reading The Expression however, cannot be what Darwin intended. In the passages which concern, for example, weeping or blushing, he can find no examples in the animal kingdom which match the two activities. (We may take the weeping horses, mourning Patroclus in The Iliad, to be a fiction.) There is the standard expression of an Englishman’s superiority to the ‘savage’ peoples of the globe, but he does not find a cockatoo or a chimpanzee who weeps.
A New Zealand chief ‘cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favourite cloak by powdering it with flour’. I saw in Tierra del Fuego a native who had lately lost a brother, and who alternately cried with hysterical violence, and laughed heartily at anything which amused him. With the civilized nations of Europe there is also much difference in the frequency of weeping. Englishmen rarely cry except under the pressure of acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.7
The empathetic Darwin, who wept so copiously over the death of Annie, or who bathed with tears a letter from his wife expressing her religious belief, has turned into a stiff-upper-lip Victorian. Likewise, as he disclosed to his Autobiography, the boy who had loved reading Byron, Thomson’s Seasons and Scott had developed into a man who had ‘wholly lost . . . all pleasure from poetry of any kind’.8
Blushing, he wrote, in one of the least convincing pieces of speculation, towards the conclusion of his book, ‘originated at a very late period in the long line of our descent’.9 It is interesting, and surely wrong, when he identifies the sole, or chief, cause of blushing in human beings as anxiety about their appearance.
Those who opposed Darwin’s central contentions must often seem to later generations extraordinarily obtuse, their identification of the fixedness of species, as defined by Linnaeus, with ancient religious orthodoxy simply bizarre. Their questioning of Darwin’s view of humanity, however, does not always seem so strange.
In the tenth edition of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the geologist announced – it was in 1869 – his total conversion to Wallace and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. It is a good marker of how far, and how quickly, things had come. Only ten years before, even Huxley had been unconvinced by any idea of mutation of species. Lyell was moving in the direction of accepting it, but having seen the flaws in Lamarck he had been slow to accept the new theory; and while accepting the phenomenon of evolution, Lyell was slow to accept Darwin’s theory about how it happened.
Where opinions began to divide – once evolution itself became accepted in the scientific world – was over the question not only of how human beings originated, but of what they were.
Adam Sedgwick’s scribble in the margin of Vestiges of Creation – ‘But why do not monkeys talk?’ – has never been satisfactorily answered by Darwinians, though Stephen Pinker has made formidably impressive attempts to do so. Noam Chomsky, whom Pinker attempted to answer in his work, remains a convincing analyst to many when he posits the apparent phenomenon, unique to human beings, of the ‘Language Acquisition Device’. The Darwinian attempt to link this to the ‘languages’ of dolphins, parrots or chimpanzees only emphasizes the gulf between the signs animals give to one another by their ‘languages’ and the sheer complexity of the ‘Language Acquisition Device’, which appears to suggest that babies are ‘hard-wired’ to build up an understanding of high grammatical complexity. In this, as in their tears and, later in life, their blushes, they are simply different from other primates. Nor does there exist any evidence of human languages ‘evolving’ from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ in the manner supposed by Herbert Spencer (and swallowed whole by Darwin in The Descent).
No wonder, then, that there were so many Victorians, such as Wallace, who resisted the easy way in which Darwin had begun to write as if it were a mere given that humanity’s complex linguistic, moral and social capacities had simply ‘evolved’ from some earlier form of ape-life.
‘Here then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man . . . he is,
indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify all other organic beings.’10 When Darwin read these words, in Wallace’s review of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (the tenth edition) he was horrified. ‘No!!!’ he wrote in the margin, underlining it three times. ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child . . . If you had not told me, I should have thought that [your remarks] had been added by someone else . . . I differ grievously from you, and I am very sorry for it.’11 Wallace was led, partly because he could never resist ‘an uphill fight in an unpopular cause’,12 into the investigation of, and acceptance of, spiritualism.
Spiritualism, as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, was a natural reaction to the materialist-rationalist position of Benthamite economists, scientific atheists and others. Of course, shamans and mediums had been summoning up the dead since at least the time when the Witch of Endor called back Samuel in the Bible. The Victorian mania for ‘spiritualism’, and the number of highly successful ‘society mediums’, such as Daniel Dunglas Home – the model for Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’ – was, in a way, very unspiritual. Even its manifestations, such as ‘ectoplasm’ flying out of the heads of psychics when they were in a trance, or the tapping of tables, or the vibrations of strange voices from the Other Side – had a physical aspect. The adepts of the cult wished to demonstrate, as you might demonstrate a scientific fact, that human beings were immortal spirits.
