Some psychologists were now looking to find a new basis for their science in human evolution, just as Charles had hoped at the end of The Origin of Species. In 1876, George Croom Robertson, a young philosopher at University College London, started a periodical called Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. The prospectus declared that psychology, “while drawing its fundamental data from subjective consciousness,” would be understood in the widest sense, as covering all related lines of objective inquiry including physiology of the nervous system, anthropology, comparative psychology and “mind as exhibited in animals generally.” Croom Robertson wrote to Charles about the plan; Charles was interested and offered his support.
In the third issue, Frederick Pollock, a young philosopher of law, wrote on evolution and ethics. “We are not content with saying that the [moral] faculty came from somewhere; we must seek to understand where it came from, and the nature of the process by which it was developed: and this is the knowledge of which Mr. Darwin has laid the foundations in his work on the Descent of Man . . . The theory of evolution furnishes us with a far more complete account than we had before of the whole genesis of the feelings which go to make up the Ethical Sanction, and leads to an explanation of one important set of the elements concerned, namely the sympathetic and social instincts, of which there was formerly no explanation at all.”
Charles read through the first five issues without registering any special interest. In the sixth, he found an article by Hippolyte Taine, the French historian and critic who had proposed a method for the scientific study of human personality in his treatise On Intelligence. Taine described the stages by which an infant girl developed and learnt to speak. He drew an analogy between the child’s successive states and the phases of primitive civilisation, referring to the idea that development of the individual “recapitulated” the evolution of the species. Charles thought at once of Willy and Annie in Macaw Cottage; he found his old white vellum notebook and looked again through his observations of their first years. His chief interest at the time had been in expression, but he now read through his notes and drew out details for a sketch of the development of “the several faculties.” He sent it to Croom Robertson, aware that his personal feelings might have influenced his judgement of the paper’s value. “I hope that you will read it in an extra critical spirit, as I cannot judge whether it is worth publishing from having been so much interested in watching the dawn of the several faculties in my own infant.” Croom Robertson decided it was worth publishing and put it into the eighth issue as “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.”
Charles first described the reflex actions he had noted during Willy and Annie’s first weeks. Sneezing, hiccuping, yawning, stretching “and, of course, sucking and screaming” were well performed during the first seven days. Charles commented on the immediate perfection of Willy’s reflex movements and the extreme imperfection of his voluntary ones in the first few days. He described Emma’s offering her breast to Willy in precise detail. “At the age of thirty two days he perceived his mother’s bosom when three or four inches from it, as was shown by the protrusion of his lips and his eyes becoming fixed . . . he certainly had not touched the bosom. Whether he was guided through smell or the sensation of warmth or through association with the position in which he was held, I do not at all know.”
Thirty-five years after Annie’s first smile at eight weeks, Charles recalled it clearly and suggested that it was a “true smile, indicative of pleasure,” because her “eyes brightened” and her eyelids were slightly closed. The smile arose when Annie looked at her mother, and was “therefore probably of mental origin.” On the power of reasoning, Charles felt that the facility with which Willy linked ideas was by far the most strongly marked of all the human infant’s distinctions from animals. “What a contrast does the mind of an infant present to that of the pike, described by Professor Mobius, who during three whole months dashed and stunned himself against a glass partition which separated him from some minnows.” But Charles was happy to give Annie second place to Jenny the orang. “Another of my infants, a little girl, when exactly a year old . . . seemed quite perplexed at the image of a person in a mirror approaching her from behind. The higher apes which I tried with a small looking glass behaved differently; they placed their hands behind the glass, and in doing so showed their sense, but far from taking pleasure in looking at themselves they got angry and would look no more.”
Charles had put the underlying question of the “Biographical Sketch” in The Descent of Man. “At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, or reflect on its own existence?” We cannot answer for the infant, nor can we answer for different animals on the “ascending organic scale.” While Taine had suggested links between the development of a human infant and primitive societies, Charles in his sketch covered all human awareness. He set out “the probable steps and means by which the several mental and moral faculties of man have been gradually evolved.” This evolution of mankind must at least be possible, he argued, “for we daily see these faculties developing in every infant.” Reading his “natural history of babies” again, remembering how his first two infants had grown into small children by imperceptible steps, Charles was tracing the pattern every parent watches, wondering how it comes about. Watching Willy and Annie in their first years, he had seen the emergence of human nature—how our ancestors became what we are.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TOUCHING HUMBLE THINGS
Memories—Wordsworth—Man and ape—Earthworms—Anne Ritchie
—Charles’s death—Emma’s widowhood—Annie’s writing case
IN 1876 CHARLES WROTE A MEMOIR for his children “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.” He thought back to their childhood. “When you were very young it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.” He touched briefly on their “one very severe grief ” in Annie’s death. He would say nothing more about her because he had written a “short sketch” of her character after her death, but “Tears still sometimes come into my eyes, when I think of her sweet ways.”
In the years since The Origin of Species, Charles had written a sequence of books each identifying new features of pattern and process in natural life, and offering powerful explanations in terms of natural selection, but many of the ideas he put forward raised more questions. In The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, which appeared in 1876, he described some features of fertility and sterility in plants for which he could not conceive any explanation. “And so it is with many other facts, which are so obscure that we stand in awe before the mystery of life.” He was still perplexed by the emergence of order and beauty out of the struggle for existence. With his own experience of Annie’s death, his understanding of what loss meant to others and his awareness of struggle and pain throughout the natural world, he could not make sense even of the idea of a remote God working through universal laws.
In his Autobiography, Charles tried to decide whether there was “more of misery or of happiness” in the life of all sentient beings, “whether the world as a whole is a good or a bad one.” His reply to the question was halting and flat, and eloquent in its weakness. “According to my judgement, happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove.” He suggested that if every member of a species were to suffer greatly and habitually, they would “neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever or at least often occurred.” Pain and pleasure were both motives to action which would contribute to the survival of the species, but while repeated pain depressed the victim, pleasure was a stimulus. In this way, natural selection had made pleasure the main guide to behaviour, as for instance with the feelings “derived from sociability and from loving our families.” He concluded: “The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly d
oubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although many occasionally suffer much.”
This argument was obviously of little use in supporting a belief in an all-powerful and beneficent God. Thinking perhaps of Snow Wedgwood’s article about his theory, and Emma’s effort to persuade herself that “all suffering and illness is meant to help us exalt our minds,” Charles wrote that some had tried to explain suffering “in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement.” But, he insisted, even if suffering had a moral purpose for mankind, it had no value for other creatures. “The number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.” Charles wrote with sudden vehemence: “It revolts our understanding” to suppose that God denied his benevolence to animals. “What advantage can there be in the sufferings of the millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time?’
Charles acknowledged that the argument was a very old one, but felt it was strong. David Hume had put the point in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. His character Philo said: “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” Philo had also anticipated Charles’s concern about the natural world. “Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.”
Charles’s final suggestion on the matter returned to his starting point. While the incidence of pain throughout natural life could not be reconciled with any claim that God was universally benevolent, “such suffering is quite compatible with the belief in Natural Selection, which is not perfect in its action, but tends only to render each species as successful as possible in the battle for life with other species, in wonderfully complex and changing circumstances.”
He came back also to an underlying question—in a sense the most radical of all those that he asked himself—whether humans could hope ever to understand these deepest issues. David Hume had suggested in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that we might believe the world to have been created by a being with intelligence and a purpose simply because that happens to be how we as humans act and understand each other’s actions. This might then be another “anthropomorphic” guess, like our presumption that animals had human feelings. Spiders, on the other hand, might believe that an “infinite spider” had spun the world from his bowels. “Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from the brain, it will be difficult . . . to give a satisfactory reason.” Charles had felt in the 1860s that the issue of order in the natural world was “too profound for the human intellect,” and “a dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.” He now took up Hume’s radical concern; he cast it in his own terms of human descent from animal origins, and applied it to the fundamental issue. “Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience?”
In the late summer of 1876, Francis’s young wife Amy bore him a son, but she died a week later of puerperal fever. Charles and Emma had been looking forward eagerly to the birth of their first grandchild, but were deeply shaken by Amy’s death. Charles turned at once to Hooker as Hooker had done before to him. “I saw her expire at 7 o’clock this morning . . . My dear old friend, I know that you will forgive my pouring out my grief. Yours affectionately, Ch. Darwin.” Francis came to live with his parents, and Emma, now aged sixty-nine, found herself in charge of the baby, who was called Bernard. Charles took to him at once, and Emma wrote to Etty: “We think he is a sort of Grand Lama, he is so solemn.”
A seventeen-year-old girl, Harriet Irvine, came to the household as a wet-nurse for the baby. She was the daughter of a farmworker in a village nearby; she had gone into service, been seduced by her employer, and given birth to an illegitimate daughter just before Bernard was born. She came with “a good breast of milk” as the advertisements offered. Most wet-nurses stayed only as long as their milk was needed, but the family became attached to Harriet, and she remained with them for the rest of her working life. Charles and Emma’s granddaughter Gwen remembered “her rich voice and lovely laugh and strong Kentish accent.” “She knew she was beautiful, I am sure, for she wore a black velvet ribbon round her neck, like any duchess.” Bernard recalled her liveliness and her “laugh not to be quelled, that rang through the house, sometimes penetrating the dining room at inappropriate moments when solemn people had come to luncheon.”
By the late 1870s, Charles was widely respected in scientific circles, but many people in the wider world could not accept what his ideas meant for human nature. They joked about them in the popular press, and he was caricatured again and again as a man-monkey. When Cambridge University gave him an honorary degree in November 1877, he was greatly pleased, but he was also embarrassed when undergraduates in the Senate House turned the ceremony into a music-hall spectacle. My great-grandfather John Neville Keynes was then a young fellow of Pembroke College, and wrote in his diary: “The building was crammed, floor and galleries, the undergraduates being chiefly in the galleries; and it was of course an occasion on which undergraduate wit felt bound to distinguish itself. The chief pleasantry consisted of a monkey swung across by strings from gallery to gallery.” There was a “ceaseless fire of interruptions (chiefly feeble)” during the long Latin oration, and when the public orator used the Latin word “apes” “the cheering was enormous . . . Darwin bore himself in a rather trying position with remarkable dignity, but I heard afterwards that his hand shook so much when he was signing the register that his signature was scarcely legible.” Charles yearned for public approval, and for people to take up and follow through his arguments wherever they might yield insights. The tremor in his signature is like the trace of a recording device, a reading of his distress that many people still would not accept his ideas about man’s common nature with animals, and chose to avoid their implications by caricature and clowning. The deep truth that he had had the nerve and imagination to recognise in his children and himself, many others could only confront with ridicule.
Caricature in The Hornet
Cambridge University Register of Honorary Degrees
People wrote repeatedly for his views on the great questions about life, death and the afterlife. In May 1879, a Russian diplomat asked for his advice as a man of science on Christ and immortality. Charles spoke firmly about the Christian Revelation. “Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there has ever been any Revelation.” He was non-committal on a future life, but commented that every man must judge for himself between “conflicting vague probabilities.” He replied to another inquirer: “My judgement often fluctuates.” But he had never denied the existence of a God. “I think that generally, and more and more as I grow older, but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.”
Charles had mentioned to Hooker in 1869 that he would very much like to hear Handel’s Messiah again, but he was afraid to try it. “I dare say I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and then I should feel very flat.” He felt he was “a withered leaf f
or every subject except Science” and added: “It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest.” This unhappiness about the loss of his former pleasures deepened as the years passed. Etty remembered that in his last years he used to say often that “attending so much to one subject had dried up his soul.” He wrote in his Autobiography of his “curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes”; he found that he “could not endure to read a line of poetry,” and felt that his mind had become “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” He often praised George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner to friends, and may have noticed her comment on Silas the weaver as he had been before the foundling Eppie came into his home. “His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding . . . The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love—only instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.”
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