Other writers recognised the suffering involved in the unending struggle for life, and found ways to justify it according to God’s benign purpose. Taking up a suggestion by Paley that killing was a mercy when an animal grew old and infirm, the Reverend William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford, declared that “the appointment of death by the agency of carnivora” was “a dispensation of benevolence” as it eliminated “the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay.”
Theologians and men of science, many themselves clergymen, saw humans as creatures in the natural world but not of it. They recognised our physical similarities with animals and suggested that our bodily organs showed the wisdom of the Creator in providing for our physical needs. But they also believed that our inner being was entirely different. Animals and plants lived and died within the natural order but man had an immortal soul and a spiritual destiny beyond the present life. One naturalist suggested that man “is placed upon this earth, not as necessary to its well-being, or to perform a part in its regulation, but as one who is undergoing a state of probation; who is journeying, indeed, as a stranger and a pilgrim.”
When Charles read Paley’s Natural Theology at Cambridge, he did not question his arguments, but the whole structure was coming under strain with new findings and ideas in geology and zoology. There were questions in the air, challenges and fears. The extraordinary variety of natural life was one puzzle. Professor Robert Grant of University College London, whom Charles had known in Edinburgh, told his students in 1828 that “Nine hundred species of intestinal worms have already been extracted from the bodies of animals, although comparatively little of the attention of naturalists has hitherto been directed to this extraordinary tribe of beings.” Taxonomists found it difficult to decide on the differences between some species, or to make ordered sense of the similarities and discrepancies that close comparison revealed.
More critically for people outside the narrow world of expert knowledge, geology and palaeontology were revealing how long and strange the history of the earth and its inhabitants had been before man’s first appearance. By the 1820s many geologists had abandoned a literal interpretation of the biblical account of the Creation. The aeons of prehistory revealed by the careful study of geological formations prompted questions about man’s significance in the scheme of things. As the fossil record became clearer, the extinction of kingdom after kingdom of monstrous prehistoric animals before the appearance of man raised issues about God’s purpose in Creation. To Alfred Tennyson writing in the 1840s, Nature “lent evil dreams,” and he faltered when he looked for her “secret meaning in her deeds.” Some had suggested that if Nature was indifferent to individual creatures, she was “careful of the type” or species. But no.From scarped cliff and quarried stone,
She cries, “A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.”
Man trusted that God was love and that love was “Creation’s final law,” but “Nature red in tooth and claw with ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”
Many, though, found excitement in the geologists’ new longer view. In 1826, a character in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey asked: “Can you conceive anything sublimer than the gigantic shadows and the grim wreck of an antediluvian world? Can you devise any plan which will more brace our powers, and develop our mental energies, than the formation of a perfect chain of inductive reasoning to account for these phenomena? What is the boasted communion which the vain poet holds with nature compared with the conversation which the geologist perpetually carries on with the elemental world?”
Charles was thrilled by the challenge. A friend who sat with him at Professor Sedgwick’s lectures in Cambridge remembered many years later how he talked eagerly about “the enlarged views both of time and space which geology could give.” When Professor Sedgwick explained his speculations about the probable age of the earth, Charles exclaimed: “What a capital hand is Sedgwick for drawing large cheques upon the Bank of Time!”
In 1830 he read John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. By “natural philosophy” Herschel meant the physical sciences in their broadest sense. His title was dry and discursive, but he gave an account of the aims of scientific understanding, and a view of what the future held, which seized Charles’s imagination. The book gave him a “burning zeal” to make his own contribution.
Although Herschel did not challenge natural theology directly, he suggested a radically different approach. While Paley had simply celebrated every instance of design in nature as another piece of evidence of the Creator’s goodness and creative power, Herschel wrote of man as a “speculative being” who “walks in the midst of wonders,” intrigued by the hints of underlying patterns in the infinite variety of the living world and searching for grand principles to explain them. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and his laws of motion were a triumph of the scientific approach. After Laplace had consolidated Newton’s achievement by demonstrating that the solar system was stable, Herschel claimed that the laws of nature were “not only permanent, but consistent, intelligible and discoverable.” The way forward was to embark on an inductive inquiry into natural phenomena, searching for the underlying patterns and inferring the grand causes. On the vexed question of the link between the truths of religion and of science, the word of the Bible and the evidence of nature, Herschel argued that science should claim its own authority, separate from that of Scripture. “We must take care that the testimony afforded by science to religion, be its extent or value what it may, shall be at least independent, unbiased and spontaneous.”
Many at the time felt with Herschel that science should approach the natural world with awe and an openness to possibilities beyond the limits of current factual knowledge. Science was not seen as a narrow method of knowing; the word itself stood for understanding, broadly conceived. Science shared concerns with metaphysics, religion and art, and connections were made. In 1833, Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus of the view of the universe as “one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine,” a machine “fixed to move by unalterable rules.” He suggested that “to the wisest man the system of Nature . . . remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion.” Although he was often critical of their work, many men of science shared his view.
Professor Henslow befriended Charles; he recognised his promise as a naturalist and encouraged him to take up geology as a serious pursuit. Professor Sedgwick was planning a field trip in North Wales to examine some problems in the geological history of the area, and Professor Henslow persuaded him to take Charles along as his apprentice. Charles mastered the use of his “clinometer” for measuring slopes with careful practice on his bedroom furniture, and spent a week in August walking with Professor Sedgwick in the Welsh mountains. Sedgwick taught him how to read a landscape for its ancient history, and how to develop guesses into a theory by testing them with other observations. The two men took parallel lines across the country; Charles collected specimens and, when he rejoined Sedgwick, he explained his ideas about the stratigraphy. Sedgwick discussed his suggestions, and Charles wrote later that “this of course encouraged me greatly, and made me exceedingly proud.”
Sedgwick also showed Charles the imaginative approach to science. A bluff Yorkshireman, he had met the poet William Wordsworth when he was geologising in the Lake District in the early 1820s. They went on many long walks together, talking freely about their shared love for nature and poetry. When Sedgwick became President of the Geological Society of London in 1830, he told the society that their science could never be exact like astronomy because of the infinite complexity of the material facts. “There is an intense and poetic interest in the very uncertainty and boundlessness of our speculations.” Some years later Wordsworth asked Sedgwick to write an account of the geology of the Lake District to add to his well-known Guide to the Lakes. The man of science was glad to make his contribution to the poet’s book, writing that “
No one has put forward nobler views of the universality of Nature’s kingdom than yourself.” The nobility lay in Wordsworth’s metaphysical themes. Sedgwick believed that geological understanding complemented the insights about the natural world, the human mind and ultimate truths that Wordsworth had drawn from the landscape he loved. The reach of geology was still not yet clear, “and there is still so much of wild untamed nature about it, that it is almost as well fitted to inflame the imagination, as to inform the reason.” There was room in Sedgwick’s science for intuitions and insights that could not be conveyed in objective description, including perhaps those “questionings of sense and outward things” that Wordsworth valued from his early experiences. Sedgwick would say to his students: “I cannot promise to teach you all geology; I can only fire your imaginations.”
When Charles was seized with the ambition to make a mark as a man of science, he was twenty-one and recognised that one way to gain experience and attention would be to travel abroad as a naturalist. The opportunity came in 1831, when he eagerly accepted an invitation to join HMS Beagle on a two-year expedition in the southern oceans. Captain FitzRoy planned to survey the coast of South America and determine longitudes for the Admiralty. He wanted a young gentleman naturalist to accompany him on the voyage, and Charles’s name was suggested, as much for his good manners as for his knowledge and promise as a naturalist.
As HMS Beagle sailed through the mid-Atlantic to South America, Charles fished with a net for marine invertebrates and caught huge numbers to examine under his microscope. “Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms and rich colours. It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.” He first saw the “glory of tropical vegetation” on the Cape Verde Islands. “Tamarinds, bananas and palms were flourishing at my feet . . . I was afraid of disappointments; how utterly vain such fear is, none can tell but those who have experienced what I today have . . . I returned to the shore, treading on volcanic rocks, hearing the notes of unknown birds, and seeing new insects fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.” When, weeks later, he walked into a Brazilian forest, he wrote: “The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind. If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the strange flower it is crawling over . . . The mind is a chaos of delight.” He wrote from Rio de Janeiro to Professor Henslow: “I am at present red-hot with spiders; they are very interesting, and if I am not mistaken, I have already taken some new genera.”
Before Charles embarked, Professor Henslow had suggested he read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and FitzRoy gave him a copy of the first volume which had just appeared. Lyell stated in the title that his aim was to “explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.” This simple notion had been developed by other geologists before Lyell but he gave it definitive form. It came to be known as “uniformitarianism”; the label is dull but two elements are fundamental to our present understanding of the history of natural life. First, the approach focused on natural processes like sedimentation and erosion that could be observed as they happened, and it avoided explanations that depended on supposed events outside the experience of living people—global floods, volcanic cataclysms and other catastrophes. Learning from Lyell’s writings about the ways in which observable processes could be used to explain how geological strata were formed, folded and worn away through time, Charles studied plants and animals and sensed how much he might be able to explain about their forms as well from natural processes that he could watch as they worked around him.
The second element of the approach was the length of time available for the geological processes to work through. The few thousand years set by Archbishop Ussher in the standard chronology of world history were nowhere near enough to accommodate any gradual trends. But when the geologists argued from known rates of change and other pointers, that each geological era must have lasted for many millions of years, Charles was able to use these periods of time to allow for the slow evolution of living things as well as geological change. He was to write in The Origin of Species that Lyell’s Principles of Geology produced a “revolution in natural science.” Charles himself took the revolution into the study of plant and animal life.
During his years on HMS Beagle Charles collected thousands of specimens and filled many hundreds of pages with observations on geology and zoology. Thinking boldly about what he saw, he built a theory of the raising of the South American continent, and another about the formation of coral islands. He wrote about a walk through a forest in Brazil among “numberless species of ferns and mimosas,” that “it is nearly impossible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings which are excited; wonder, astonishment and sublime devotion fill and elevate the mind.” And some time later, “Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: no one can stand unmoved in these solitudes without feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”
Charles responded to the richness and variety by ranging freely, and with the same wonder, from the minute particulars of a single plant or insect to the widest view of a whole forest, plain or mountainscape. Every day he observed, collected and made notes on his detailed findings. When he reached the crest of the Andean Cordillera, “the profound valleys, the wild broken forms, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of ages, the bright coloured rocks contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined. Neither plant or bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted the attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad I was by myself; it was like watching a thunder-storm, or hearing in the full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.” He was puzzled by his haunting memories of the empty wastes of Patagonia. “Without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then . . . do these arid wastes take so firm possession of the memory? . . . I can scarcely analyse these feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination.” The plains of Patagonia are “unknown: they bear the stamp of having thus lasted for ages, and there appears no limit to their duration through future time.”
In the last months of the voyage, after he had visited the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific off the coast of Ecuador, Charles noticed some strange patterns of likeness and variation between tortoises and mocking-birds on different islands. He noted that if islands close to each other were inhabited by distinct species which were nevertheless closely linked and not found elsewhere, it would be worth making a special examination of the “zoology of archipelagoes . . . for such facts would undermine the stability of species.” That was the start of his thinking about change and evolution. At the time, though, he still accepted the idea that God had brought all forms of life into existence by separate acts of creation. At that point he had no idea where his conjectures would lead him.
During the voyage, two experiences which had nothing to do with his work as a naturalist shook Charles deeply. Both were encounters with people—black slaves in Brazil and “savages” in Tierra del Fuego. As with the creatures of the Galapagos, Charles saw likenesses and differences; they triggered strong feelings, and were to come to mind again and again in later years as Charles developed his ideas about species and human life. When he eventually tackled the question of man’s place in nature, slaves and savages were close to the centre of his thinking.
Charles had first learnt about the tropics from a freed black slave in Edinburgh. John Edmonston earned his living as a �
��bird-stuffer”; Charles took lessons from him and enjoyed their conversations; he commented later how like Edmonston’s mind was to the minds of Europeans. At the time that was an exceptional view among people in Charles’s social position, but his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood I had been a leading member of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the 1780s, and produced at his pottery the well-known cameo of the chained slave with the question “Am I not a man and a brother?”
When HMS Beagle landed at Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Charles saw many slaves and met slave-owners. Captain FitzRoy saw no evil in the institution, and Charles, quite out of character, quarrelled with him. One day FitzRoy told Charles that he had just visited a rich slave-owner who had summoned many of his slaves and asked them whether they wished to be free. “All answered ‘No.’ I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of slaves in the presence of their master were worth anything. This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word, we could not live any longer together.” Charles thought he would have to leave the ship but, after a few hours, FitzRoy sent an apology and asked Charles to continue to share his table.
A few weeks later, Charles and his companions met an Irish trader who took them to a plantation he had cleared from the forest six days’ ride into the interior. The trader had a violent quarrel with his agent in which he threatened to sell at auction an illegitimate mulatto child of whom the agent was very fond. He also said he would take all the women and children from their husbands and sell them separately at the slave market in Rio. Charles wrote in his diary: “Can two more flagrant and horrible instances be imagined?” Faced by such cruelty, he rejected out of hand the argument that slavery was “a tolerable evil.” He was angry at some English writers who showed sympathy towards slave-owners, but gave no thought to the feelings of their slaves. “Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder.”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 4
