An ambitious chemist, William Crookes, who discovered the element thallium in 1861 and later experimented with cathode rays, launched a personal inquiry into “psychic force” in the early 1870s. Like Chambers, he was alert to the possibility of fraud; he kept careful notes through a series of Home’s séances, and was impressed by what he saw. In April 1871, Home held a séance for Crookes and a group of friends. Crookes recorded that “At first we had very rough manifestations, chairs knocked about, the table floated about six inches from the ground and then dashed down, loud and unpleasant noises bawling in our ears and altogether phenomena of a lower class. After a time it was suggested that we should sing, and as the only thing known to all the company, we struck up ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ . . . After that D.D. Home gave us a solo—rather a sacred piece—and almost before a dozen words were uttered Mr. Herne was carried right up, floated across the table and dropped with a crash of pictures and ornaments at the other end of the room.”
Charles was interested in Crookes’s inquiry, and his cousin Francis Galton reported to him about a séance he had attended with Crookes in April 1872. The table moved while Galton was sitting under it checking for deception, and “beautiful sacred music” was played on the accordion. He wrote to Charles about another occasion that “The absurdity on the one hand, and the extraordinary character of the thing on the other, quite staggers me; wondering what I shall yet see and learn, I remain quite passive with my eyes and ears open.”
In 1874, Charles’s brother Erasmus arranged a séance with a paid medium at his house in Mayfair. Charles, Emma and Etty attended, together with George Eliot and her partner G. H. Lewes, the journalist and philosopher. Mr. Lewes was firmly and openly doubtful, and Erasmus was almost certainly hoping for quiet entertainment, watching in the darkness. Etty remembered that Mr. Lewes “was troublesome and inclined to make jokes and not play the game fairly.” The usual manifestations occurred, “sparks, wind-blowing, and some rappings and movings of furniture.” Emma watched and kept an open mind. Charles, on the other hand, found it so hot and tiring that he went away, as he wrote to Hooker, “before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place.” “The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish.”
Charles and Emma’s niece Snow discussed the séance with Emma when she was staying at Down a few months later. Snow wrote to a friend that Emma thought Charles had “quite made up his mind he won’t believe it, he dislikes the thought of it so much.” Referring to a remark Charles had once made to her, Snow asked Emma if he did not say it was a great weakness to allow wish to influence belief. Emma replied: “Yes, but he does not act up to his principles.” Was that not bigotry? Emma replied with heavy irony: “Oh yes, he is a regular bigot.” The sharpness of her comment suggests she may have felt it was more difficult for her to keep her open mind and her hope of salvation, than it was for him to reject religion as he did in the name of scientific reason.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE DESCENT OF MAN
Descent of Man—Expression of the Emotions—
Biographical Sketch of an Infant
IN 1869, CHARLES DECIDED AT LAST that he must tackle the issue of human origins himself. He explained to a friend: “I am thinking of writing a little essay on the Origin of Mankind, as I have been taunted with concealing my opinions.” After completing The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, the last part of his main argument about the origin of species, he began work on The Descent of Man. The book, which eventually appeared in 1871, dealt first with the animal ancestry of mankind and how we became human, and then tackled the controversial question of human race, introducing the idea of evolution by sexual selection to explain racial differences.
On the first theme, Charles thought back to Jenny the orang; he remembered his ideas about the natural origins of the moral sense, and he read David Hume’s moral philosophy again. He took up Hume’s suggestion that the “social virtues” were part of our instinctive makeup rather than the product of reasoning from abstract principles, since they had a natural appeal to “uninstructed mankind” long before we had received any “precept or education.” He thought again about his “natural history of babies,” and remembered all he had learnt from Annie and after her death about the strength of a parent’s love and how memory lasted. He wove his observations as a naturalist together with his own experiences into a view of human nature which looked beyond received ideas.
The book was widely read, and was not criticised as fiercely as Charles had feared. The times were changing and Charles was encouraged to follow up the book with two more works on aspects of human nature, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.” As things worked out, few of his themes were taken further in his lifetime, but they have been since. The subjects are still as bedevilled by controversy and prejudice as they were in Darwin’s day, but that is hardly surprising when it is the buried history of our own nature that we are arguing about.
Charles was thinking about The Descent of Man in early 1870 when Etty, now a young lady of twenty-seven, was wintering in Cannes. Emma wrote to her that Charles was working on his new book. “I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off.” She was to repeat that phrase a year later in a comment to a friend when the book was published. Her offhand remarks touched again on the “painful void” between Charles and herself as he held to his idea of a remote and mysterious Deity while she tried to maintain her faith in Cowper’s loving God who was present everywhere and was “the life of all.”
Charles sent Etty a chapter of The Descent of Man, explaining that its object was “simply comparison of mind in men and animals.” He feared that “parts are too like a sermon; who would ever have thought that I should turn a parson?” He asked Etty for “deep criticism” and any corrections of style. He knew that she was close to him in much of her thinking. She believed in the essential unity of mind and matter; she saw disease and death as purely natural processes; she had doubts about life after death, and one of her few convictions was “the worship of humanity.”
With a characteristic preference for things unconnected with Charles’s “stiff ” ideas, Emma added a wry footnote to his letter. Etty had written about the hotel in Cannes, and her mother replied: “How very odd the meat being so bad. One would have thought with a population of rich invalids, that would have been the first thing to attend to.”
In The Descent of Man, Charles emphasised our animal origins with a new force and sharpness. He still felt a strong need to puncture human arrogance, but he was now more hopeful that others would agree. It was only our natural prejudice, and “that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods,” which led people to reject the idea of common descent. “But the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation.” He offered his insistently humble view of man’s place in nature with a deadpan sharpness. He repeated the point he had made about the human frame in The Origin of Species. “It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a monkey, bat, or seal.” He now added a number of other points by which the link was shown, though few readers would have been happy to recognise them. Wild baboons like beer, get drunk and are hung over; we share syphilis, cholera and herpes with animals, and we are infested with many of the same parasites. Charles took up a point made by Huxley in his “monkey book.” Charles wrote: “As some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo, I have given one of man and another of a dog, at about the same early stage of development, carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy.” And he drove the point home with a twist. Anyone who reje
cted with scorn the belief that the shape of his canine teeth was due to his early ancestors having been given them as weapons, would “probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his descent. For though he no longer intends, or has the power, to use these teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his ‘snarling muscles’ . . . so as to expose them ready for action, like a dog prepared to fight.”
The Descent of Man (1871)
Charles gave man “a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.” He echoed Huxley and Wallace in suggesting that human progress was a matter for admiration and gave hope for the future, but his tone was slightly different from their triumphalism. “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.” He went on to insist, though, that “we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability.”
Charles was now at last prepared to reveal to the world the ideas about the animal roots of human nature which he had explored so freely and boldly in his private notes thirty years before. He worked them up with the fuller understanding of ties and feelings in a close family that he had gained in the thirty years of his life with Emma, their surviving children, and the three who had died. He pointed first to the basic instincts of survival and affection that we share with the lower animals, “self-preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-born offspring, the desire possessed by the latter to suck, and so forth.” The last two he had watched with devoted attention in Emma and their newborn children.
Taking up the ideas that Wallace had put forward in 1864, Charles suggested that “the parental and filial affections, which apparently lie at the base of the social instincts” were probably developed through natural selection. With the bravado of a person who is confident he is right but does not expect to be believed, he added that “Parental affection, or some feeling which replaces it, has been developed in certain animals extremely low in the scale, for example in star-fishes and spiders. It is also occasionally present in a few members alone in a whole group of animals, as in the genus Forficula, or earwigs.” It was Etty who had suggested the point; she had always found small creatures and their families absorbing, looking with Annie at her ladybirds in their “little box” in Malvern, watching over the farmyard cats with their kittens in her shed at Down, and caring for the fancy pigeons she had bred with her father.
Moving on to the more complex emotions, Charles suggested that most were also common to the higher animals and ourselves. All humans and other primates “have the same senses, intuitions and sensations, similar passions, affections and emotions, even the more complex ones such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude and magnanimity; they practise deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humour; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees.” Charles then worked through the attributes which different writers had argued were unique to mankind: Lyell’s improvable reason, the fashioning of tools which the Duke of Argyll had suggested was distinctively human, abstract thought, self-awareness, language, the sense of beauty and the belief in unknown spiritual agencies. In each case he pointed to features of animal behaviour that might be reckoned to be rudimentary forms of the human capability.
One aspect of his approach was criticised at the time by G. H. Lewes and others. He indulged freely in anthropomorphism, making guesses about the mental processes of animals and describing them in terms of human experience. He was aware of the dangers, and acknowledged that as animals could not speak to humans, we could never understand their feelings in the way in which we understand each other’s. He made the point in a striking image from one of his country walks. “Who can say what cows feel when they surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?” One could, though, make inferences. He based his suggestions about animals’ feelings and reasoning on a few simple rules which he was willing to explain. He was also always equally interested to determine where animals’ mental processes differed from humans’, as to identify where there might be similarities. The important point for him was to explore the possibilities either way, and to find where any boundaries could be traced.
Charles’s approach had another special feature which he did not recognise and others did not challenge. It was generally agreed that one essential source of knowledge in the science of man was the thinker’s awareness and understanding of his or her own mental experience. Charles accordingly made free use of introspection. He assumed that his own feelings and reflections were shared by others, but some of his generalisations from his own experience were open to question. He wrote on memory that “A man cannot prevent past impressions often repassing through his mind.” And “Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection: past impressions and images are incessantly and clearly passing through his mind.” That was his experience, but his words, “incessantly and clearly” for example, suggest that memories came to him more insistently and vividly than to most people.
Charles also had an acute sense of how others might be judging him, and presumed that other people shared his feelings. A man’s “early knowledge of what others consider as praiseworthy or blameable . . . cannot be banished from his mind, and from instinctive sympathy is esteemed of great moment.” He repeated the point in a slightly different form. “Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us, of their imagined approbation or disapprobation; and this all follows from sympathy, a fundamental element of the social instincts.” He felt the same way about rules on their own. “We recognise the same influence in the burning sense of shame which most of us have felt, even after the interval of years, when calling to mind some accidental breach of a trifling, though fixed, rule of etiquette.” Yet again, this sensitivity was not a general truth of human nature, but a special feature of Charles’s intense and highly strung sensibility. Most other people have more control over their thoughts, and manage better to overcome, avoid or ignore feelings of shame or guilt.
Charles’s account of human awareness was, in this respect, a reading of his own experience. He made the instinctive feeling of sympathy a key notion. He saw it as distinct from love, since “a mother may passionately love her sleeping and passive infant, but she can hardly at such times be said to feel sympathy for it.” However, there was a close link; a loved adult or child always received special sympathy, and Charles could never forget his feelings for Annie in her fretfulness and distress throughout her last illness. He saw elements of sympathy in memories charged with feelings, as when he wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “The vivid recollection of our former home, or of long past happy days, readily causes the eyes to be suffused with tears; but here . . . the thought naturally occurs that these days will never return. In such cases we may be said to sympathise with ourselves in our present, in comparison with our former, state.”
Charles saw that humans were essentially social animals like the man-like apes, and the early ape-like progenitors of man were probably social too; they were all likely to have “retained from an extremely remote period some degree of instinctive love and sympathy” for their fellows. In emphasising the instinctive nature of their sympathy, Charles agreed with Wallace that it had probably developed through natural selection, “for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
Moving on to the moral sense, Charles acknowledged that it was the most noble of all human attributes, and “by far th
e most important of all the differences between man and the lower animals.” Recognising the issue to be a second critical test for his theory of evolution alongside the design of the eye, he opened a fresh chapter of his book with Kant’s “great question” about the origin of the sense of duty. He wrote that many others far more able than he had discussed it at length, but he would offer his own answer because he could not avoid the issue, and “as far as I know, no one has approached it exclusively from the side of natural history.”
Charles took up the argument he had written out in 1839, and suggested that we developed our moral sense when, as part of a natural process, early man first achieved self-awareness, remembered his past actions and reflected on his feelings about them. Charles believed that “The social instincts . . . will from the first have given to [man] some wish to aid his fellows, some feeling of sympathy, and have compelled him to regard their approbation and disapprobation. Such impulses will have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong. But as man gradually advanced in intellectual power, and was enabled to trace the more remote consequences of his actions; as he acquired sufficient knowledge to reject baneful customs and superstitions; as he regarded more and more, not only the welfare, but the happiness of his fellow men; as from habit, following on beneficial experiences, instruction and example, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals, so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher.”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 33
