Darwin

I

The word ‘evolution’ is so popularly accepted and so generally employed in connection with Darwin’s theories that it will never be displaced; but it is not wholly satisfactory, because it always suggests progress from a lower to a higher and hence involves a difficult and invidious definition of terms. Some such phrase as ‘descent with modification’ would probably be more exact. But whatever the term used, to associate it as a scientific theory or discovery exclusively with Darwin or any other one man would be absurd. The natural hypothesis of earlier thinkers was that divine creative power, in whatever shape, had established the different forms of life on the earth pretty much as they exist to-day. But those who looked more deeply, were inclined to surmise, in view of the close and evident bonds of kinship between all living things, that variety had developed from comparative unity and that the vital impulse, having first appeared in elementary forms, became gradually elaborated into more and more complicated organisms. The vast pains that Darwin took to substantiate this view, together with his particular explanation of how the process came about, have forever bound up the idea of evolution with his name, but he did not originate it nor did he claim to have done so.

The various hints and manifestations of earlier evolutionary theory are admirably elucidated in Professor Osborn’s ‘From the Greeks to Darwin.’ The vast curiosity and reflection of Aristotle anticipated here, as everywhere, and some of his sentences have a striking evolutionary bearing: ‘Variety in animal life may be produced by variety of locality.’[389] ‘Locality will differentiate habits also; for instance, rugged highlands will not produce the same results as the soft lowlands.’[390] And Empedocles suggests Darwin’s views even more directly. Under the régime of Biblical and Christian tradition evolutionary thought naturally made little progress. But with the greater freedom of the eighteenth century, notions of modification by descent again appeared. In England Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, the botanical poet, speculated curiously on the subject, and there were various other intimations, notably in Chambers’s ‘Vestiges of Creation,’ while Darwin himself felt that he was much influenced by the geological theories of Lyell. In Germany Goethe became profoundly interested in the metamorphoses of life. Especially in France Buffon and St.-Hilaire led up to the ‘Philosophie Zoologique’ of Lamarck, which propounded the theory of modification in a very definite form, and suggested the mode in which the modification was accomplished. Lamarck’s idea was that plants and animals, by an inborn, vital impulse, adapted themselves to their environment, and that these adaptations were transmitted by inheritance. Thus wading birds acquired webbed feet and the neck of the giraffe was elongated in its effort to obtain its food from the branches of the trees. The great stumbling-block of this theory has always been the difficulty of proving that acquired adaptations are inherited.[A]

What is of interest to us, however, is Darwin’s attitude toward his more immediate predecessors, Buffon, Lamarck, Chambers, etc. This attitude has been a matter of much comment by Samuel Butler and others and it is not perfectly easy to understand. That Darwin in his earlier thinking as well as in his later was influenced by previous investigators is evident enough, for instance in touches like that in the ‘Voyage of the Beagle’: ‘Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and productions of his miserable country.’[391] Also, his frequent comments show that he knew what had been written before him and had profited by it, and in the later editions of the ‘Origin’ he took some pains to acknowledge the obligation. Yet his tone in his letters is by no means respectful and of Lamarck especially, who had done the most, it is difficult for him to speak without a sneer. Thus, in 1844 he writes: ‘Heaven forefend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression,” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals,” etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so.’[392] Again, a little later: ‘With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any systematical ones, except Lamarck’s which is veritable rubbish.’[393] And later still, in 1859, he writes to Lyell: ‘You often allude to Lamarck’s work; I do not know what you think about it, but it appeared to me extremely poor; I got not a fact or idea from it.’[394]

Various explanations of Darwin’s treatment of Lamarck have been offered. One at least, that of a disposition to run down a predecessor from jealousy, we may exclude as absolutely as is possible with poor human nature. Everything we know of Darwin in other connections justifies us in doing this. Professor Osborn, after referring to ‘the disdainful allusions to him [Lamarck] by Charles Darwin (the only writer of whom Darwin ever spoke in this tone)’[395] observes that ‘it is very evident from all Darwin’s criticisms of Lamarck, that he had never studied him carefully in the original.’[396] But against this view we have to set Darwin’s own comment (italics mine): ‘What I consider, after two deliberate readings, as a wretched book, and one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.’[397] It is true that Darwin, as in the quotation above as to ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals,’ apparently misinterpreted Lamarck’s view of the self-adaptation of the individual to its environment into the absurd assumption that animals and even plants deliberately willed their own evolutionary progress; but on the other hand Darwin all his life and especially in his later period wavered toward Lamarck’s adaptation theories. It has been suggested that in Darwin’s university years French thought and French scientists were distinctly in disfavor and that Darwin imbibed an enduring dislike of them.[398] Darwin himself hints that he may have been influenced by a prejudice in favor of his grandfather as Lamarck’s predecessor. But it seems more probable that he disliked Lamarck because he regarded him as a theorist and speculator who did not found his argument on a sufficiently broad basis of fact, whereas Darwin toiled for years at observation and experiment before he gave his theory to the world at all. This explanation is indicated in Darwin’s remark to Lyell: ‘As for Lamarck, as you have such a man as Grove with you, you are triumphant; not that I can alter my opinion that to me it was an absolutely useless book. Perhaps this was owing to my always searching books for facts.’[399] In any case one cannot help wishing that Darwin had spoken of a man so prominent and so highly esteemed as Lamarck a little differently.

II

Darwin first began to be interested in the idea of modification by descent during his voyage on the Beagle and in the year 1837.[400] In his earlier years he had been satisfied with the conventionally orthodox theological and scientific conception of the creation of distinct species, and all his youthful work had been on the basis of this view. Such phrases as the note, written in 1834, in Valparaiso: ‘It seems not a very improbable conjecture that the want of animals may be owing to none having been created since this country was raised from the sea,’[401] are obviously significant of the earlier attitude. But as he observed more widely and became more and more impressed with the infinite diversity of forms and the delicacy of shading with which they pass into each other, the conviction grew that the possibilities of development were unlimited, and that individual differences might pass into varieties and these again into species, making the origin of varied life far simpler and more unified than had ever been imagined. And such an evolutionary process seemed much more in accord with general natural laws than the abrupt appearance of fixed, highly organized forms in sudden sufficiency. As he says, ‘the subject haunted me,’ and from a very early period he began making notes and memoranda of all observations that might bear for—or against—the gradual modification of species.

The difficulty was to imagine just how the process of modification was brought about, and until he could get some light on this point, his enthusiasm for the general idea was chilled and baffled. As we have seen, Lamarck’s view, that living beings directly adapted themselves to their surroundings and then transmitted these adaptations to their descendants, seemed at least inadequate, and Darwin felt that the theory must have some more solid basis, if it was to prevail at all. He set his mind to work for months and months, and he applied the intellectual method which he himself has so admirably defined in a letter to his young son: ‘I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.’[402]

Searching for the cause and meaning of everything which occurred, he at last achieved the discovery he was looking for, and so knew what is assuredly one of the greatest of spiritual delights. Largely by watching and studying the results of deliberate human selection with plants and animals, he was led to his great principle of natural selection, that is, assuming the tendency in all living beings to vary individually, that in the intense struggle for existence those variations which are beneficial and help the organism to live and prosper will be preserved and transmitted. The causes of variation, whether spontaneous or to be found in environment, Darwin never pretended entirely to explain. Of the principle of natural selection, or as Spencer phrased it in a form which Darwin admitted to be in some respects more satisfactory, ‘the survival of the fittest,’ perhaps its discoverer has given no better statement than the sentences in the second volume of the great work on ‘Plants and Animals under Domestication’: ‘To consider the subject under this point of view is enough to strike one dumb with amazement. But our amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number, during an almost infinite lapse of time, have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life has been preserved, whilst each which was in any way injurious has been rigorously destroyed. And the long-continued accumulation of beneficial variations will infallibly have led to structures as diversified, as beautifully adapted for various purposes, and as excellently coördinated, as we see in the animals around us. Hence I have spoken of selection as the paramount power, whether applied by man to the formation of domestic breeds, or by nature to the production of species.’[403]

It is not to be supposed that the first grasp of evolution through variation and natural selection could have carried with it the full foresight of the enormous changes, mental, moral, and spiritual, that such a theory was likely to produce. Still, a mind so keen and active as Darwin’s was bound to catch some suggestion of those changes. For instance, the astonishing and deadly ease with which the old workings of Providential adaptation and design slipped under the new light into mere operations of mechanical law could not fail to foreshadow the philosophical and theological upheaval that was sure to follow. A spirit trained in the conventional atmosphere of the early English nineteenth century must necessarily have regarded such an upheaval with a certain amount of question, awe, and even dismay; and Darwin indisputably had something of these feelings mingled with the triumphant joy of discovery.

It is profoundly characteristic of the man that he did not hasten to fling the discovery to the world, to get the immediate excitement and glory, leaving discussion and substantiation to come afterwards. He was so hesitant, so doubtful of his own methods and his own powers, that he delayed even to commit his conjectures to writing in his note-books, lest they should become hardened and distorted by the prejudice of statement and so misleading. His one idea was to get confirmation, by every line of study and experiment, and for twenty years he toiled with deliberate patience before he was willing to make the attempt to put his results into publishable shape.

And all the time there was the chance, perfectly present to his mind, that death might prevent him from ever making the discovery known. And all the time there was the chance that in the world of scientific thought that was seething about him some one else might anticipate him and propagate the idea, perhaps in a form less convincing and less substantial than he would be able to give it. Just as he was getting to the stage of preparation which he had aimed at, exactly this thing seemed likely to happen. In June 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, a scientist of standing and ability, with whom Darwin had corresponded, sent him a paper largely anticipating Darwin’s ideas on natural selection, so largely that Darwin wrote of it to Lyell: ‘I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract; ... so all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.’[404] And he even doubted whether he should make his views public at all, for fear of depriving Wallace of credit: ‘I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’[405] The difficulty was adjusted, however, by friends, and a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace both, was read at the meeting of the Linnæan Society on July 1, 1858, giving the world the first inkling of what natural selection was to mean. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote prophetically of this meeting: ‘The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armoring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath.’[406]

The relation between Darwin and Wallace in regard to priority of discovery is one of the finest things in the whole history of science. There was no jealousy, no bitterness, no acrimony, but instead a full recognition of each others’ achievements, and a sympathetic understanding which ripened into a helpful and unbroken friendship. Wallace’s statement of the matter long after Darwin’s death, is as noble in its unselfishness as words can make it: ‘But what is often forgotten by the press and the public is that the idea occurred to Darwin in 1838 ... nearly twenty years earlier than to myself, and that during the whole twenty years he had been laboring collecting evidence from the vast mass of literature of biology, of horticulture, and of agriculture.... Such being the facts of the case, I should have had no cause for complaint if the respective shares of Darwin and myself ... had been henceforth estimated as being roughly proportioned to the time we had each bestowed upon it ... that is to say, as twenty years to one week.’[407] Darwin’s summary, more general, is equally worthy of both: ‘I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe that I can say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely sure that it is true of you.’[408]

The first promulgation of the Darwinian ideas, with those of Wallace, was therefore made in July, 1858. In the following year, November, 1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ was published. Darwin himself regarded this book as a mere preliminary sketch, requiring to be supported and buttressed by confirmatory evidence of all sorts. But it at once overwhelmed the world, and has always been looked upon since as the cardinal statement of the theory. As Huxley said of it, ‘It is doubtful if any single book, except the “Principia,” ever worked so great and so rapid a revolution in science, or made so deep an impression on the general mind.’[409] And innumerable quotations could be drawn from other sources to the same effect.

III

The study of the complication of motives that prompts a man like Darwin, and many others, to reveal and establish a great scientific discovery in spite of violent opposition is profoundly curious and profitable. It seems to me that a main element in these motives, with the scientist, as with the artist and the politician and the actor and the preacher and the athlete alike, is ambition. As Darwin himself expresses it: ‘The action of unconscious selection, as far as pigeons are concerned, depends on a universal principle in human nature, namely on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbors. We see this in every fleeting fashion, even in our dress.’[410] And again: ‘Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness.’[411] The concrete essence of ambition is the desire for fame, to have one’s efforts, one’s powers, one’s achievement, one’s ego, recognized, appraised, established by the applause and commendation of one’s fellow-men. And surely this desire in itself is a natural and even a laudable one, leading, as it does, to most useful and enduring accomplishment. The drawback is that the thirst for glory is so enticing, so overmastering, that it seduces men into strange and dubious methods of obtaining it. Glory, or notoriety, is got so often by base means, the trickster and the charlatan can so often snatch its rewards and laurels from honest labor and even from genius divinely endowed, that sincere and earnest spirits are impelled to disclaim the pursuit altogether, and to insist, perhaps with genuine self-deception, that fame as a motive hardly enters into their struggle at all. This contention is maintained the more easily, since it is evident that other motives, and those most powerful, do enter in. There is the restless, ever active disposition of human nature to be doing something, almost no matter what. To work, to create, to achieve, is to live. Nothing else can properly be called life. To have done great things, to be doing them, makes you feel that you exist, and why should you vex yourself with what other men think of them? Then for the scientist there is the sheer delight of adding one grain of truth to the slow accumulation of the centuries, as for the artist there is the splendid sense of having created something beautiful. You know it, you feel it: what do the others matter? And there is further the rich reward of believing, or hoping, that you are doing even a little to help or to enlighten your fellow-men, whether they are ever aware of it or not. Few things are more soothing or cheering to the soul than that. So that there have been thinkers and there have been artists who have said, and perhaps sincerely thought: ‘I care not if some other man gets the credit of my work altogether. So the work is done, and I have done it, and know that I have done it, and it endures, and is worthy to endure, what does the name or the glory of it matter?’ There are many who have said this, there may be some who have meant it; but surely there are few who have tried to do great things, and have not longed for the human recognition of them; and why should they not?

It is peculiarly interesting to trace the play of these motives in Darwin, because here, as everywhere, he has such an extraordinary, intimate frankness of revelation. The love of fame was strong in him, and he knew it. He tells us of his childhood: ‘Some other recollections are those of vanity—namely, thinking that people were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance and another for boldness in climbing a low tree, and what is odder, a consciousness, as if instinctive, that I was vain, and contempt of myself.’[412] Of his earlier scientific years he writes: ‘I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men ... whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion.’[413] At a much later period he still recognizes the same stimulus: ‘Without you have a very much greater soul than I have (and I believe that you have), you will find the medal a pleasant little stimulus; when work goes badly, and one ruminates that all is vanity, it is pleasant to have some tangible proof, that others have thought something of one’s labors.’[414] And how charming is the frank admission that he hates to have glory snatched away from him: ‘I always thought it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I had a grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken and punished.’[415] Certainly in him the tranquil appreciation that there was a something of inborn power can hardly be set down to the inferiority complex, and inborn power does yearn for outward applause: ‘Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.’[416]

Yet with the passage of years and the growing sense of the futility and injustice of popular reputation, Darwin was more and more disposed to disclaim all interest in it. The desire for glory, he admits, is a universal human motive, and a natural one; but there are others of as much, if not more account: ‘You do me injustice when you think that I work for fame; I value it to a certain extent; but, if I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.’[417] To the very end it is clear that the sale of his books and the public discussion of his ideas are pleasant to him, perhaps more pleasant than he recognizes. But assuredly no man can be said to be unduly hungry for the laudation of the mob who waits patiently for twenty years before making public his claims to it. And it is certain that never under any circumstances would Darwin have descended to court it by base means or false pretences. As he himself sums up the whole matter, speaking of his youth: ‘All this shows how ambitious I was; but I think I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable review or a large sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame.’[418] We certainly have here no extreme or morbid case of notoriety-seeking.

IV

Thus, in 1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ startled the world with the theory of evolution through natural selection, a theory which immediately raised a storm that in some of its aspects is still raging. It is occasionally urged that Darwin’s reputation and success had an element of good fortune in them, that, as with so many discoveries, he simply happened to express and as it were crystallize general ideas that were vaguely present to many and needed only a vigorous expositor to give them universal acceptance. Doubtless there is a measure of truth in this view. Yet it must not be forgotten how much Darwin’s character, his tact and reasonableness, his persistent energetic logic, above all the enormous industry and fidelity of his research entered into his final triumph. His own comment on this matter of the timeliness of his theories is exceedingly interesting: ‘It has sometimes been said that the success of the “Origin” proved “that the subject was in the air,” or “that men’s minds were prepared for it.” I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.... I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed. What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained.’[419]

In any case, the evolutionary theory, when first propagated, was bitterly attacked, both by scientists and by others. Darwin’s personal friends, and some of the younger men, who were less hardened in conservatism, supported him, though with more or less hesitation and reserve. But scientists of the older school, trained in established traditions, were generally most unfavorable. Some of them brought up the innumerable difficulties of which Darwin himself was only too well aware. Others resorted to the usual weapons of abuse and sarcasm. Owen in England and Agassiz in America represented perhaps the strongest conservative views. To them the Darwinian system was merely a passing heresy, which could not stand for a moment against the array of facts and arguments which they could bring from their vast experience and observation of the natural world.

The hostility of religious circles, aroused by the ‘Origin’ and increased by the later books, especially ‘The Descent of Man,’ was fiercer and less discriminating than that of the scientists. Perhaps the acme of it was reached in the savage interchange in which the Bishop of Oxford asked Huxley whether he ‘was related by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape’ and Huxley retorted that a man had no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather, but if he were to feel shame, it would be for an ancestor ‘who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’[420]

This sort of thing was by no means agreeable to Darwin, and he repeatedly refers to the pain and distress it caused him. For example: ‘I have just read the “Edinburgh,” which without doubt is by ——. It is extremely malignant, clever, and I fear will be very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley’s lecture, and very bitter against Hooker. So we three enjoyed it together. Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have got quite over it to-day. It requires much study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself.... It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which —— hates me.’[421]

What interests us is the attitude of Darwin in all the aspects of the struggle, and we find everywhere manifested and illustrated the mental and spiritual qualities which we have analyzed generally in the preceding chapters. Long and cruel as the controversy was, that large, tranquil disposition could not be warped or embittered, or substantially shaken in its kindly serenity.

And first there is the candor, the readiness to admit mistakes and errors, and to recognize the force and significance of an opponent’s view and arguments. Darwin himself complains humorously of a weakness in this regard: ‘My God, is not the case difficult enough, without its being, as I must think, falsely made more difficult? I believe it is my own fault—, my d——d candor.’[422] But, damned or not, it is a quality worth admiration. As Professor Osborn excellently puts it: ‘If he were living, ... he would be in the front line of inquiry, armed with matchless assemblage of fact, with experiment verification, and not least with incomparable candor and good-will. This bequest of a noble method is hardly less precious than the immortal content of “The Origin of Species” itself.’[423]

This is the language of an admirer. But it is curious to see how with critics and opponents

Thus, even Alexander Agassiz, who was much more favorably disposed to evolution and to Darwin than was his father, remarks on this point of candor: ‘I was somewhat surprised in Darwin’s Life to see the element of wishing his cause to succeed as a cause brought out so prominently. The one thing always claimed by Darwin’s friends had been his absolute impartiality to his own case. Certainly his correspondence with Hooker, Huxley, and Gray shows no such thing.’[424] And others, distinctly more hostile, are much more severe, declaring that Darwin’s passionate eagerness to prove his point was quite incompatible with any real fairness or breadth. But surely there is misunderstanding here. Any one can be impartial who is perfectly indifferent, and when you care not which side triumphs, there is no merit in seeing the justice of both. The charm and the interest of Darwin are precisely that he was devoted to his own theory, that it was the effort of his life to prove it, and yet that at the same time he could and did look for all the facts against it and even go to excess in allowing weight to the objections that could be opposed to him.

And as the candor was all the more notable because of the enthusiasm, so it was notable because it did not spring from a cold temperament, or an incapacity for natural human anger and indignation. Darwin enlarges, perhaps unduly, on his heat of temper in youth; and in age, though his control and his patience got the better of this, still the sparks would fly when unjust and unreasonable attack annoyed and irritated him. Thus, he cries out in regard to Owen: ‘You would laugh if you could see how indignant all Owen’s mean conduct about E. Columbi made me. I did not get to sleep till past 3 o’clock.’[425] And again, ‘If Owen wrote the article “Oken” and the French work on the Archetype ..., he never did a baser act.... You are so good a Christian that you will hardly understand how I chuckle over this bit of baseness.’[426] When an adversary, not content with rational argument, resorted to personal attack: ‘I care not for his dull, unvarying abuse of me, and singular misrepresentation. But at p. 244 he in fact doubts my deliberate word, and that is the act of a man who has not the soul of a gentleman in him.’[427]

But, however at moments indignation might get the better of him, Darwin, as we have already seen, rarely allowed himself to be drawn into anything approaching controversy. Intelligent argument with those who had reasonable objections might be profitable, but where was the use of contending with those whose object was not to convince but to prevail? ‘I do so hate controversy,’ he cries, ‘and feel I shall do it so badly.’[428] And elsewhere he writes, more generally: ‘All that I think is that you will excite anger, and that anger so completely blinds every one, that your arguments would have no chance of influencing those who are already opposed to our views.’[349]

With this general attitude, it is interesting to find Darwin, in one of his few temptations to sharp retort, checked and repressed by the great fighter Huxley. Darwin submits the draft of a crisp letter, asking Huxley to criticize, and the latter suggests omissions: ‘Though Thomson deserved it and more, I thought it would be better to refrain. If I say a savage thing, it is only “Pretty Fanny’s way”; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.’[350] Huxley and other friends also restrained Darwin in perhaps the most annoying of his controversial affairs, that with Samuel Butler over the translation of Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin. It is not necessary for us to attempt to unthread the complicated tangle of this dispute, since we may start with the confident assumption that both men were perfectly sincere in their good intentions. The curious may read the whole story in the Life of Butler by Henry Festing Jones, and it is pleasant to find that the biographers of Butler and of Darwin were able to come together and by comparing unprinted documents straighten out the difficulty to their mutual satisfaction.

With his fellow-workers, those who were following the same lines of research from the same general point of view, Darwin’s relations were most cordial and sympathetic. There was no jealousy, no rivalry, no undue sensitiveness. We have indeed seen that in his treatment of his predecessors, notably Lamarck, there was a suggestion of what in any one else might be taken for a jealous attitude. But all the dealings with Wallace nobly refute the possibility of any such suggestion. And at all times and under all circumstances Darwin was ready to recognize and to proclaim the merits and achievements of those who were laboring beside him. When there was any question of priority in an idea or a discovery, he refused to assert himself unduly: ‘I have always had a strong feeling that no one had better defend his own priority. I cannot say that I am as indifferent to the subject as I ought to be, but one can avoid doing anything in consequence.’[351] When a scientist, whether known or unknown, applied to him for assistance or suggestion, he was always ready to supply it, so far as was in his power. Above all, he was appreciative, almost to excess, of any assistance that was rendered to him, and his gratitude to his friends for supporting and sustaining him and forwarding his views is touching in its naïve earnestness. To Huxley, to Hooker, to Lyell, to Gray, to Häckel, to a dozen others, he speaks with enthusiastic acknowledgment of their efforts and their contributions, and, as Huxley points out, he was ready to bestow almost the same gratitude for services that in themselves appeared to be absurdly insignificant.

For he had a singular humility, most notable and appealing in a man of such distinguished power and achievement. ‘A mind conspicuous for its powerful humility and strong gentleness,’ is Huxley’s vivid characterization.[278] Again and again he expresses distrust of his powers, sense of inadequacy and incompetence, keen consciousness of limitation. Such phrases as the following from the book on Orchids, are constantly recurring: ‘To any one with more knowledge than I possess, it would be an interesting subject to trace the gradations between the several species and groups of species in this great and closely-connected order.’[279] Sometimes the expression of humility is direct. ‘Any one with ordinary faculties, if he had patience enough and plenty of time could have written my book.’[280] Sometimes there is a humorous assertion of the contrary which is quite as significant: ‘I should rather think there was a good chance of my becoming the most egotistical man in Europe. What a proud preëminence!’[281] Occasionally the profession of humility is so extreme, as in the sentence in regard to Owen, ‘The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about; what a strange man to be envious of a naturalist like myself, immeasurably his inferior!’[282] that critics disposed to find fault have discerned something of affectation in it. It is of the nature of the deepest humility always to expose itself to such accusations as this; but surely no one can study Darwin carefully, can be familiar with his work in all its aspects, and not set him down as one of the most sincerely humble spirits that ever lived.

V

This humility and feeling of his own incompetence made Darwin keenly alive to the difficulties connected with his great undertaking and gave him such a clear sense of them that at times he felt incapable of solving them at all. As he says in the sixth chapter of the ‘Origin’: ‘Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.’[283]

Take one of the most striking, if not the most crucial difficulties, one which puzzled and perplexed Darwin from the first and was made a fruitful text for criticism by his adversaries, the development of the eye. Was it to be supposed that so delicate, so complex, and so highly adapted an organ could be produced by mere accidental variation working through inheritance and the gradual survival of the fittest? And Darwin investigated and compared and reflected, until he was ready to state his position thus: ‘Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.’[284]

Sometimes the difficulties appear in themselves insignificant, yet their bearing is such as to make them of extreme importance. For example, how the useful institution of neuter insects could be developed by inheritance was a terrible problem. It ‘at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory.’[285] Study and observation wear it away; yet it is disposed of with the candid remark: ‘I must confess, that, with all my faith in natural selection, I should never have anticipated that this principle could have been efficient in so high a degree, had not the case of these neuter insects led me to this conclusion.’[286] Or there is the coloring of the peacock’s tail, which has to be explained by extreme wrestlings of logical ingenuity. And again, as compared with these seemingly petty obstacles, there are the great questions involved in the essential tissue of the theory itself. There are the gaps, the breaks, the missing links, not only between man and his simian ancestors, but completing all the gradations between all the existing forms of development. Many and many an hour, and one may say, many a year of anxious thought did Darwin bestow on this point. He could meet it only with such eager comment as he makes after his prolonged study of the orchids: ‘In the comparatively few orchids described in this volume, so many and such plainly-marked gradations in the structure of the rostellum have been described, ... that we may well believe, if we could see every orchid which has ever existed throughout the world, we should find all the gaps in the existing chain, and every gap in many lost chains, filled up by a series of easy transitions.’[287] And there were such vast problems as sexual selection and pangenesis, which we discussed in a previous chapter, and there was even the central element of natural selection itself, which in darker moments seemed but a weak agency for sustaining the whole world: ‘If I think continuously on some half-dozen structures of which we can at present see no use, I can persuade myself that natural selection is of quite subordinate importance.’[288]

The interesting aspect of this matter of difficulty, as with other things, is Darwin’s way of meeting and facing it. There was an excitement, a stimulus, undoubtedly, a joy in attacking tough problems and conquering them. But there was also a pervading consciousness of what the difficulties were, and some have even thought an almost too pervading disposition to go out of one’s way to deal with them. As Huxley puts it: One ‘who desires to attack Mr. Darwin has only to read his works with a desire to observe not their merits but their defects, and he will find ready to hand more adverse suggestions than are likely ever to have suggested themselves to his own sharpness, without Mr. Darwin’s self-denying aid.’[289]

And there is always the appreciation, in handling the difficulties, of the danger in over-ingenuity, of the subtle possibilities of betrayal by reason ever toiling with intense ardor to arrive at its preconceived ends. ‘God knows I have never shirked a difficulty,’ said Darwin.[290] But the danger lies not only in shirking, but in the dissolving, transforming power of prejudice and enthusiasm. Here again Darwin tried to be ever on his guard: ‘I am fairly rabid on the question, and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty sure to become so.’[291] He would not be misled, or fooled, or betrayed: ‘As I read on, I felt not a little dumbfounded, and thought to myself that whenever I came to this subject I should have to be savage against myself.’[292]

But you can never be sure that you have been savage enough, and there are moments when unexpected obstacles make you mistrust your theory, mistrust your method, mistrust your reasoning power. ‘If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory.’[293] And who knows that it cannot be proved? After months of study, a clear statement of opposing facts seems for the moment to demolish everything. ‘You give all the facts so clearly and fully, that it is impossible to help speculating on the subject; but it drives me to despair, for I cannot gulp down your continent; and not to be able to do so gives, in my eyes, the multiple creationists an awful triumph.’[294] And with his extraordinary gift of direct self-revelation, Darwin sums up the state of mind in one vivid sentence: ‘Your letter actually turned me sick with panic.’[295]

Thus there are times of discouragement and disgust. One gets to feel that one has utterly overestimated one’s work and one’s powers. One concocts ‘pleasant little stinging remarks for reviews, such as “Mr. Darwin’s head seems to have been turned by a certain degree of success, and he thinks that the most trifling observations are worth publication.”’[296] One concludes that all the years of vast labor have been given to no valid result and that one had better have cultivated one’s cabbages with health and quietness: ‘At present I feel sick of everything, and if I could occupy my time and forget my daily discomforts, or rather miseries, I would never publish another word.’[297] Such periods of depression in Darwin are peculiarly interesting, because he was by no means of a melancholy temperament, nor, in spite of his nervous weakness, was he inclined to a fretful or morbid pessimism. Yet, even with all his courage and all his patience, with all his past labor and all his victory, there were moments toward the end when the grave seemed inviting for its mere vastness of repose, without any definite prospect of anything further: ‘I am rather despondent about myself, and my troubles are of an exactly opposite nature to yours, for idleness is downright misery to me, as I find here, as I cannot forget my discomfort for an hour. I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy; and I have no little jobs which I can do. So I must look forward to Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.’[372]

VI

The recognition and the accumulation of difficulties naturally involved modification of views. Indeed any really vital theory is bound to develop and modify itself with the vitality of the man who holds it. And Darwin was as vital as any man, and his theories as vital as any ever were. No man ever recognized more fully than he the desirability, the necessity of modification: ‘I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.’[373] He groans over the burden and difficulty of perpetual correcting: ‘I am grieved to hear that you think I must work in the notes in the text; but you are so much better a judge that I will obey.’[374] Again: ‘It is only about two years since last edition of Origin, and I am disgusted to find how much I have to modify, and how much I ought to add.’[375] Nevertheless, as the successive editions of the ‘Origin’ and the other books show, he continued to add and to alter and to correct, to the very end. The minute, thoughtful, and far-reaching character of these alterations shows well in the concluding sentence of the eleventh chapter of the ‘Origin,’ which in the first edition read, ‘old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life produced by the laws of variation still acting round us and preserved by natural selection,’ and later, ‘old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, the products of Variation and the Survival of the Fittest.’

Besides revision in detail, there was of course always a tendency to larger modifications of the general theory. Ingenious and far-reaching as natural selection was, the difficulties connected with it were so immense, that the loyalty of even its discoverer at times necessarily wavered, or perhaps we should say better, his enthusiasm heated and cooled. Moreover, natural selection depended upon variation, and variation to Darwin was always an inexplicable puzzle, for which no solution or too many might be found. Disinclined as he was to accept or even to respect his predecessors, Buffon and Lamarck, Darwin in later years, when the pressure on natural selection became fiercer, seemed to turn more to the adaptive solutions of these predecessors. As Professor Morgan puts it: ‘Despite the contempt with which Darwin referred to Lamarck’s theory, he himself, as we have seen, often made use of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characters, and even employed the same illustrations cited by Lamarck.’[376] And Professor Osborn indicates admirably the gradual process of the change which took place in Darwin’s attitude: ‘Starting with some leaning towards the theories of modification of Buffon and Lamarck, he reached an almost exclusive belief in his own theory, and then gradually inclined to adopt Buffon’s and then Lamarck’s theories as well, until in his maturest writings he embraced a threefold causation in the origin of species.’[377] The drift towards Lamarck is well shown in a passage of a letter to Galton, written in 1875: ‘If this implies that many parts are not modified by use and disuse during the life of the individual, I differ widely from you, as every year I come to attribute more and more to such agency.’[378] At the same time, to the very end natural selection remained in Darwin’s mind not only the quintessence of his theorizing, but the prime agent by which modification had been accomplished. In ‘The Descent of Man’ he explains and in a manner excuses any earlier undue insistence upon it, but also reiterates his firm faith in its great, if not omnipotent efficacy: ‘If I have erred in giving to natural selection great power, which I am very far from admitting, or in having exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.’[379]

VII

So through the sixties and seventies the battle for evolution went merrily on, and before Darwin’s death in 1881 it was evident that the scientific world was largely converted and still more evident that the theory had taken solid hold upon the popular mind. Even in the sixties Charles Kingsley could write to F. D. Maurice: ‘The state of the scientific mind is most curious; Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact.’[380] Darwin himself was no aggressive fighter, though perhaps his quiet, persistent, logical statement of facts went further than fighting. But he had fighting followers, and they pushed his cause with an energy and dogmatism which he himself could hardly have manifested. In England Spencer gave the theory the metaphysical and philosophical sanction and support which Darwin was not equipped to render, and the brilliant, ardent eloquence of Huxley paralyzed opponents with incisive argument and stinging ridicule. In America Asa Gray, the great botanist, was a convert from the beginning and a most helpful disciple, and his aid was peculiarly welcome to Darwin, because Gray’s eager orthodoxy was useful in conciliating many whose prejudices would naturally have been most adverse. Darwin repeatedly spoke of Gray as understanding his ideas better and expounding them more effectively than almost any one. John Fiske was also a valuable champion from the more philosophical side. In Germany Weisman and Häckel were the most prominent apostles, and immensely effective, though, with thorough-going Teutonic logic, they were ready to push conclusions to lengths that were not always acceptable to Darwin himself.

The amount of popular interest is probably best shown in the extensive sale of Darwin’s books. ‘The Origin of Species’ was successful at once. It went through edition after edition, in Darwin’s lifetime six in all, and was translated into numerous foreign languages. The later books, even those of a more technical character, sold like popular fiction, and the last one, on the apparently uninviting subject of earthworms, found many readers everywhere.

Darwin was of course quite conscious of his growing triumph. Even hostility, animosity, execration, painful as they might be, afforded evidence of power and achievement. And he would not have been human, had he not relished the varied testimony of respect and admiration which came to him from every quarter. His natural distrust of himself was so great that it was hard for him to believe in success, even when it came, and before it came, he deprecated any attempt to discount it: ‘Please do not say to any one that I thought my book on Species would be fairly popular, and have a fairly remunerative sale (which was the height of my ambition), for if it prove a dead failure, it would make me the more ridiculous.’[381] Yet, however one might shrink and distrust oneself, to enter a great scientific meeting and have every one present rise to do one honor was undeniably agreeable. And, with his unfailing frankness, Darwin admits that praise was pleasant, and one could not have too much of it, provided one felt that it was in a measure deserved: ‘You pay me a superb compliment, and as I have just said to my wife, I think my friends must perceive that I like praise, they give me such hearty doses.’[382] Also, with equal frankness, he makes it plain in his autobiographical sketch that he realizes how great the success was and that it implied a certain prospect of permanence: ‘My books have sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years.’[383] When he died, he was unquestionably rated as one of the very first, if not the first, among the scientific men of his time.

And it is equally unquestionable that his reputation has rather increased than diminished ever since. ‘“Before and after Darwin” will always be the ante et post urbem conditam of biological history,’ says Professor Osborn.[384] Naturally Darwin’s theories have been criticized and attacked and largely modified by later investigations and discoveries. To Darwin himself variation, as the basis of natural selection, was the difficult, inexplicable point, and the experiments of Mendel, the mutation theory of De Vries, and many other lines of research have put the subject of variation in a new light. Natural Selection has been and will be the subject of controversy, both as to its working and as to the extent of its efficacy. Darwin’s inimitable caution left the way open for all these investigations, as is so well indicated in the excellent sentence of Professor Whitehead: ‘Darwin’s own writings are for all time a model of refusal to go beyond the direct evidence and of careful retention of every possible hypothesis.’[385]

Yet, after fifty years of discussion and argument, Darwin’s main positions hold their own with extraordinary tenacity. In the very latest word on the subject Professor Parker says: ‘It is to the credit of Charles Darwin and his body of able supporters that the scientific world was finally brought to accept the principle of descent with modification and natural selection as the means whereby it was accomplished.’[386] Professor Conklin affirms that: ‘The only scientific explanation of such adjustment or fitness is Darwin’s principle of natural selection of the fit and elimination of the unfit, and it is eloquent testimony to the greatness of Darwin that more and more this great principle is being recognized as the only mechanistic explanation of adaptation.’[387] And Professor Osborn is equally emphatic: ‘In my opinion natural selection is the only cause of evolution which has thus far been discovered and demonstrated.’[388] While from a more abstractly philosophical point of view the emphatic recently written words of Professor Ralph Barton Perry, give ample support to the general Darwinian position: ‘In truth there is no gulf between man and the animal. We cannot deny to the latter sensibility, memory, and intelligence. The facts which prove it would fill volumes.... The animal has feelings of mother love, attachment, and devotion. It differs from us in degree only; its “soul” is to ours what the bud is to the flower and fruit.’[234]

But, independent of all agreement or disagreement with Darwin’s theories, the striking thing is the consensus of scientists in praise of the man, and the recognition of his effort and method and life as a model for all scientific workers. It is rare that praise is so unalloyed, so persistent, and so complete. In this connection it is interesting to compare the nature of the glory of the poet, Shakespeare, for example, with that of the scientific writer. Shakespeare is not only remembered, he is read. Every successive generation takes up his plays for themselves, reads into them its own passions and experiences, and thus makes them a perennial possession of humanity, quite independent of their author. The works of Darwin, or of any other scientist, have no such enduring value for actual perusal. The curious study them for historical record. But for the mass of mankind and even of scientists, a large part of them has entered into universal knowledge and may be read in any textbook, and the remainder has become obsolete and of no value except for what it meant in an earlier day. The scientist’s name becomes detached from the work, even though he remains great because he did it. Yet the name, in spite of being thus detached, perhaps all the more because it is detached, shines like a star through century after century.